Better dac = worse TV sound?

[sharpi31]

Earlier today i finished a new dac: TDA1541A with SAA7220, CS8412 and LME49710 (x2 per channel). The last few dacs i've built have been TDA1543 based non-oversampling types - this latest dac was an experiment with a regular 8x oversampling configuration.

Until today I've been using an 8x TDA1543 (non-oversampling) dac with passive I/V in my living room system. This was connected to a grounded grid preamp and then a UCD180HG power amp. I have two sources: a Philips DVD/CD player and a Nokia freeview digital TV box.

As the new dac has an active output stage, I connected it to the UCD power amp with only a 10Kohm stepped attenuator inbetween. This meant that I removed both the TDA1543 dac and valve preamp.

With CD the new system sounds great: particularly smooth and warm. However, TV sound is now really unpleasant: background music on TV programmes sounds nice but voices sound compressed, grainy and gritty.

I'm sure that the new dac (and passive preamp) are only highlighting the horrible truth of digital TV audio. If CD didn't sound so good through the new dac i'd think it was broken!

So the moral of the story seems to be that digital TV audio sounds far better through a nice warm valve stage. I think I'll have to reconfigure the system so that the new dac is connected to the DVD player and the old dac and preamp handle TV duties.