Mike Anderson Wrote: > For sound quality, how would you compare the SB3 running into a high end > DAC with a high end CD player? > > I'm having a debate with someone who thinks you simply can't beat a top > quality CD player, no matter how good your DAC is. > > I'm not an engineer, but I can't imagine why this would be the case, > assuming you've got error-free rips of your CDs. > > Can any engineers or technophiles address this issue? > > thanks
There are two things at play there - jitter and the quality of the DAC (either external or internal). If you were using the CD player as a digital transport (i.e. sending its digital out into the same DAC as the SB) I think the SB will probably win or tie, as its jitter is supposed to be (and has been measured to be) very low. Of course jitter can't really be quantified with one number (it has a spectrum), but I think the SB jitter is so low it's below the quantization error inherent in 16 bit audio, and hence should be totally inaudible. One caveat is that this applies to jitter measured at the SB digital out, but additional jitter will be induced by the connection to the DAC. Some external DACs (Benchmark for example) claim to be able to eliminate jitter entirely via rebufferring. I'm not sure this is really possible, but if true it would make essentially all digital sources sound exactly the same. On the other hand if you compare the analogue outs of the CD to the SB with or without external DAC, there are now more variables in play - the relative quality of the DACs, etc. Furthermore some high-end CD players have fancy systems for reducing jitter in the internal connections (for example using the same clock for both the buffer output and the DAC). In any case I suspect the most important factor here is the quality of the analogue output stage of the DAC, rather than jitter. As an aside, I think the differences involved here are far, far less important than those due to speakers and room acoustics. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24670 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
