To Dac or not to Dac?

[admin_exported]

Hi everyone,

Recently purchased the Marantz PM6004, Kef Q300, and a Sonos Z90 running both Spotify and Napster. I was thinking about getting the Marantz CD6004 I'm a couples of months but everybody seems to be going DAC crazy.

Would it be better for my system to invest in a Dac rather then CD player?

Although I do have a lot of CDs I tend to stream a lot for quickness and variety.

DAC or no DAC? And if DAC, which one would you suggest for my current system. Cable is Chord Company Carnival silver screen. Basic interconnect at present but changing. Music types, everything but like a bit of bass and feeling behind my music.

Thanks

 

[Rick1979]

As I mentioned on another thread, bought a v dac ii to use with my Sony bdp480 so I can get rid of the cd. The v dac only just pips the 480 on its analogue outs. Xbox 360 is connected via hdmi to tv and optical to v dac and again the v dac only just wins. It just beats the rotel 965bx cd player too. From this I can only conclude that the Sony 480 is better on its analogue out than you might think or maybe I have got a dud dac. Is that even possible? I don't know.

One thing I will say is the other day when I connected to the tv the difference was night and day but then I discovered that even though I was using optical out from the tv, I could change sound formats on the tv ie movie, music, speech etc and it changed the sound accordingly. Why would it do this if the dac is meant to be decoding???

Confused!!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

the tv is appling digital signal processing (DSP) to sound. This would be done at the same stage as the picture is decoded.

As it is "digital" signal processing this is done on the digital audio signal. This signal is then send to the internal DAC or digital output.