Come on, my cat also has to listen to it. Cats can hear up to 85 kHz (when they are young and not hearing impaired anyway), so according to the sampling theorem, the required sample rate is at least 170 kHz. Add some margin for transition bands and 192 kHz is a perfectly reasonable sample rate.
Something labelled as professional will sound really good? But, aren't both just using IC's.
You are contradicting yourself there.
I never said that a DAC for x t$ could not sound 'good'.
... actually a dac should not sound at all. It is only translating a signal.
But a decent cheaper dac will not sound 'worse'.
The best ratio you will find in professional gear.
There are 3 categories of dacs:
the cheap little boards you can buy at ali-express. Some of them are not bad and might even stand up in a blind audition vs an 3 k$ hifi dac. But you never know what you get.
The hifi-dacs:
More created by marketings specialist than technicians.
The formular is quite simple:
1. make it expensive ( because expensive is better)
2. put it in a nice case (probably the most expensive in production)
3. give it a nice name and print a wolf on it
4. Buy some very positive test in some hifi magazines.
Of course they dont need to be bad. But the magic is done by marketing.
At thats what you pay for.
the professional dacs:
Studios are using dacs regularly since more than 25 years to do their work. They were the first to use higher sample rates.
Some companies have a really good experience in it and do their one investigations. The users are the most critical, professional listeners.
Plus the market got quite main stream the last 15 years. The mass production lowered the price.
In the end, you got the same ICs in all the devices. the surrounding is always different and of course the case.
But I dont want (or can) change anyone's mind.
If you think, you need this or that expensive hifi dac, to be happy again in your life or listen to music like 20 years ago (when you ears were better), go ahead.
But I promise in a blind test vs a decent 200 $ dac, you will fail (but thats not what it is about, right?)
... actually a dac should not sound at all. It is only translating a signal.
But a decent cheaper dac will not sound 'worse'.
The best ratio you will find in professional gear.
There are 3 categories of dacs:
the cheap little boards you can buy at ali-express. Some of them are not bad and might even stand up in a blind audition vs an 3 k$ hifi dac. But you never know what you get.
The hifi-dacs:
More created by marketings specialist than technicians.
The formular is quite simple:
1. make it expensive ( because expensive is better)
2. put it in a nice case (probably the most expensive in production)
3. give it a nice name and print a wolf on it
4. Buy some very positive test in some hifi magazines.
Of course they dont need to be bad. But the magic is done by marketing.
At thats what you pay for.
the professional dacs:
Studios are using dacs regularly since more than 25 years to do their work. They were the first to use higher sample rates.
Some companies have a really good experience in it and do their one investigations. The users are the most critical, professional listeners.
Plus the market got quite main stream the last 15 years. The mass production lowered the price.
In the end, you got the same ICs in all the devices. the surrounding is always different and of course the case.
But I dont want (or can) change anyone's mind.
If you think, you need this or that expensive hifi dac, to be happy again in your life or listen to music like 20 years ago (when you ears were better), go ahead.
But I promise in a blind test vs a decent 200 $ dac, you will fail (but thats not what it is about, right?)
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No soldering...but there is hundreds of soldering points on the dac before one measly connector. Followed by miriad of other soldering points after.
Its the same nonsence when replacing ac cord. 2ft of thicker wire does not make difference with miles of the same wire before and after, especially inside the transformer.
This thread belongs to lounge.
Maybe you can't hear the difference a good interconnector or power cable makes in a system. That is fine by me. I think this is simply not possible not to hear the difference... but it is still fine by me because I simply could not care less what you think.
No IC in the Holo.
Are you a preacher in your daily job? You should learn some more updated psalms.
Single crystal forging tech makes more difference than the type of metal. My interconnects are single crystal copper and'robably sound just as good as yours. I compared them with QEDs reference cable, which is twice as expensive, they were left in the dust. It's simply the future of anything metal.
True.
False. Some power cords are thick because they are shielded. When power cords do affect SQ, it is usually because they are acting as distributed filters to help keep AC line RFI/EMI from getting into the electronics box. It means the audio device was not well designed to sufficiently attenuate AC line noise itself. If you want to measure the filtering effect use a wideband spectrum analyzer to look at AC line noise, noise coming out of the electronic device power supply, out of its analog output, and look for noise modulation effects in the audio signal. Evidence may be found in one or more of those places depending on the particular circumstances. Its already been shown by measurements before, just not published in AES. Most everyday engineering problems and solutions are not formally published. Its just normal engineering work.
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John Curl used specially processed silver wire in his famous Blowtorch preamp. Recently I sent John some experimental custom manufactured line level cables made from copper for him to evaluate. He said they sound like no wire at all (even though they were 2-meters long), that they were something special, and something he had never seen before. I use the same stuff for all my line level connections, and I know it does have its limitations. Still, the trade off for me is that I am better off to use it as I do rather than to use any other wire I have tried. Looks to me like well known low level physical effects explain everything we might need to know about wire, so there is really nothing new here. The problem seems to be that we usually assume those low level physical effects can be ignored. That is to say, we assume we can consider wire as equivalent to an idealized low-valued resistor. Those assumptions are oversimplifications in my book.
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In some ways yes in other ways no. Lay out a fair detailed reviews for people instead of making blanket compliments. The W4S sounds much better to my ears and its built better looks better by 100x
I denied a Topping access to my rack. To each their own.
