Tone control for digital PC audio???

[admin_exported]

I'm convinced that some of the best music reproduction available is from digital files saved on a personal computer. My current favorite is high-resolution FLAC files ripped from CD or SACD sources. I bought a Aune Mini-DAC with Headphone Amplifier (see http://en.auneaudio.com/cpjs/miniusb.shtml) to drive my Sennheiser HD 650 phones from my Windows 7 64-bit PC. I was pleasantly surprised with that combination as the result far exceeded my expectations.

Here's my issue: Conventional Pre and Integrated Amplifiers have almost always offered tone controls. However, none of the DAC/Headphone Amp combinations I've reviewed, even "professional" products costing thousands of dollars, offer any way to adjust tone. In my case, the source material, Aune Mini-DAC/Amp and HD 650s can accurately produce audio beyond the range of human hearing. In some cases, this results in everything sounding a little too bright and I would like to suppress the treble a little. Unfortunately, I can't find ANY way to to that!

Whether I feed the Aune from USB or S/PDIF, it's a digital stream that hits the DAC. So, I'm thinking that tone control would almost have to be done in the Aune, after conversion to analog. I wouldn't think it practical to do tone control on the PC - which doesn't offer any way to do that anyhow.

How do the rest of your cope with this limitation? What am I missing? Is there some software package I have to run on the PC? Are there special drivers for the Burr-Brown PCM1793 DAC in the Aune that from the PC can tailor it's ouput?

I sincerely appreciate any enlightenment...

 

[SteveR750]

If you are going to apply equalisation, then it makes sense to do it before the data is streamed to the DAC. I use J River as a music player, and it gives you a very sophisticated DSP according to the developers anyway. I cannot hear any difference between it switched on or off when left at flat settings, but I have applied a slight upper mid / treble lift to add a bit of sparkle to the spendors...so it all depends on what software you use. I have compared wndows media player, itunes and J River in Windows 7 64bit and J River is in a different league sonically once you set it up correctly (i.e.allow it to manage to soundcard exclusively, use native sample rates, set same bit depth as the DAC, set the output type WASAP, ASIO etc which bypasses unnecessary windows processing. Like you, I am stunned by what is possible using lossless files and a computer - this evening I listened to the first HD track and its deeply impressive indeed.

 

[Petherick]

Hi KMorley

Sorry to go off-track with your post, but can you give any advice on ripping from SACD? Thanks.

 

[Anonymous]

Was not aware there were any CD/DVD Roms capable of reading SACD other than one Sony Vaio which I don't think allowed any way of ripping SACD. The other issue even of you can read the disks is converting SACD's DSD to PCM.

With regard to PC audio sounding bright. The probable cause as already mentioned is the Windows mixer which under Vista/Win 7 always re-samples audio (albeit 32bit float) and can sound a little bright especially if its doing 44.1 -> 48khz. Double check under control panel -> Sound what the sample rate in shared mode of the soundcard/dac is set to. Ideally anyone wanting to use the PC as an Audio media store should always be looking at WASAPI/ASIO/Kernel streaming audio output at the media file's sample rate.

 

[manicm]

SteveR750:If you are going to apply equalisation, then it makes sense to do it before the data is streamed to the DAC.

So you're saying altering the source is good? I would think any alterations should be done after the digital to analogue conversion.

 

[SteveR750]

manicm:
SteveR750:If you are going to apply equalisation, then it makes sense to do it before the data is streamed to the DAC.

So you're saying altering the source is good? I would think any alterations should be done after the digital to analogue conversion.

No, because there are side effects to changing the tonal balance of the analogue signal, which do not happen in the digital signal. There was a photographic analogy used previously, and its a bit like adjusting the image of a TIFF file compared to a JPG. Have a browse of the J River Interact forum, there is a lot of interesting information on it about this topic. Ultimately I just used my ears, and a 0.5 - 1.0db lift is subtle but noticeable. Has no effect on detail, soundstage, bass, dynamics etc that I could detect. Most (not everyone I am sure) would agree that adding passive tone controls into an analogue pre-amp can create unwanted side effects.