Why should an external dac result in better sound?

admin_exported

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I just noticed this on another forum, its a good point and hopefully one which someone here can answer.

With CD being as old as it is it's hard to believe that transport technology, particulary when it costs thousands in some cases, is incapable of reading a disc properly without introducing errors. Surely there's just as many potential problems that come from a hard drive and all the electronics around that?

By the same logic ripping a DVD to hard drive would get a better image/sound than putting the disc in the PC. It doesn't though.
 

manicm

Well-known member
I agree wholeheartedly, PC as a hifi source has its own pitfalls, and to me does not seem an ideal future-proof solution.

I'm talking specifically for very hi-res files like 192/24 bit files where tweaking is required when you want to play normal 44/16 files and vice-versa.

Obviously others' PC experiences are different and maybe they already have ideal solutions at hand.

I'm beginning to think the Logitech Squeezebox Touch is a pretty good solution - it's finally NAS certified so need for PC playback.

And finally, coming back to the CDP - if one is happy with the sound why care what error-correction or lack thereof is happening behind the scenes - does one really want to see the 1s and 0s shuttle back and forth and get gobbled up like PacMan to know they're getting bit-perfect sound??
 
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Anonymous

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hi fi newbie:

I just noticed this on another forum, its a good point and hopefully one which someone here can answer.

With CD being as old as it is it's hard to believe that transport technology, particulary when it costs thousands in some cases, is incapable of reading a disc properly without introducing errors. Surely there's just as many potential problems that come from a hard drive and all the electronics around that?

By the same logic ripping a DVD to hard drive would get a better image/sound than putting the disc in the PC. It doesn't though.

The title of your thread doesn't appear to match your argument. The DAC itself is nothing to do with the transport.

Also - there are no data error introduced (usually!) when retrieving data from a hard disk. If there were then they would be pretty useless for data storage.
 
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Anonymous

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I was looking for a rebuttal from what someone else had posted, because in my experience, external dac's offer a massive improvement with lossless compared to playing cd's on a cd player.
 
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Anonymous

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Lossless audio --> Squeezebox (e.g.) --> DAC 'A' --> Amp 'A'

Should sound the same as:

CD Player --> DAC 'A' --> Amp 'A'

...Unless the lossless audio is poorly ripped (no error correction) making it worse, or the CD player transport has poor error correction, making it worse.

Ripping CDs using dbpoweramp with accuraterip and C2 pointer, or EAC, should produce less errors than retrieving the data from a CD 'on the fly' using a 1x speed HiFi CD player.

Controversial?

Just make sure that your storage source (PC or Squeezebox or PS3 for example) is not resampling the output to, say, 48KHz (common). Squeezebox never does this, and this can also be switched off on both a PC and a PS3.
 

idc

Well-known member
This biols down to how much does the transport matter? If a DAC makes a fantastic job of the most important part of the chain, conversion of digital to analogue, then it is clear why an external DAC will result in a better sound.
 

JoelSim

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hi fi newbie:I was looking for a rebuttal from what someone else had posted, because in my experience, external dac's offer a massive improvement with lossless compared to playing cd's on a cd player.

In my experience the HDD route sounds inferior to my CD transport played through the same DAC, amp etc etc.
 

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