ARTA To Test DAC Performance

[GOR3]

If you have used ARTA to measure a DAC's performance, I would be interested in your experience.

 

[Pano]

I have. Use the spectrum FFT section. You can look at all sorts of things, single tones, high-mid-low, multi-tones, etc.
Of course you'll need a soundcard with an input to do the measuring. It becomes a little difficult to tell what is the DAC and what is the ADC. The compare overlay function can help there.

I'm sure some other folks will chime in.

 

[bolserst]

I posted some DAC measurements taken with ARTA a few years ago, including impulse response, tone bursts, and IMD. DACs were running at 44.1khz rate, and data was captured at 192kHz Juli@ sound card to try and minimize tainting the DAC behavior with the ADC response. For the DACs in CD players, I used ARTA to export *.wav file that was written to CD and then used ARTA's trigger/capture capability when playing it back. For the stand-alone DACs, you can just feed the signal directly from computer to DAC.

Practical Implementations of Alternative Post-DAC Filtering

*****
In case somebody might be interested in more details of the Pioneer Legato Link DAC see related posts:
Practical Implementations of Alternative Post-DAC Filtering: Post#322
Practical Implementations of Alternative Post-DAC Filtering: Post#326

 

[Pano]

Nice examples Bolserst. Thank you for posting those.

 

[diyralf]

Interestingly, the largest sampling rate has the largest harmonic distortion. Who would have thought that.