SoftwireEngineer wrote: > Gentlemen, jitter has been the #1 design consideration in audio for > long. Audio manufacturers like Meridian engineered buffered systems with > accurate clocks and charged a premium for their products. Only that, now > all this circuitry has been miniaturized and available in a single chip. > To be fair to the reasonable of the audio reviewer lot, some do mention > that DACs in the $1K range are now offering performance that had cost 10 > times a few years ago. One of the main aspects of the DAC design is to > receive data but reject the jitter in it. The CS8416 receiver used in > the Headroom DAC is not bad, but apparently the diy audiophile community > seems to favor the WM8805 chip because of a buffered logic. (These chips > may have only a few micro sec buffer, but something like the TotalDAC is > engineered with 0.1 sec buffer) . Please note, the quality of the power > supply will greatly influence jitter. So, if you take the Aune X1 (for > example) and modded the dc regulators to ensure a clean power supply > (costing less than a few dollars) it might rival the performance of $1K > dacs. > BTW, I am also upset about the Squeezebox getting 'damned with faint > praise' but I do see quite a few audio reviewers are using it as a > transport with very good DACs.
I woulkd disagree on a couple of pionts . I would push the timeline to the late 90's not a couple of years ago . But not even back then most dac had jitter below whats considered audible , so its mostly smoke and mirrors anyway , even if there is this "kernel of truth" there that jitter could be made to be lower and have been lowered . There have probably been 1000's of other improvements in those chips ,but they are harder to explain in marketing and audiophiles seems to not care for THD IM or noise figures (or any other important metric you could come up with ) but do care about jitter ? so which drum to beat to rally the audiophiles ? The lower price of dacs today is mostly because manufacturing in china has been a thing the last decade . And also most importantly computer audio and the raise of headphone audio has made this obscure speciality item "separate dac" see an increase in its user-base and coming from computer users they dont have any awe for silly prices just for the sake of it :) Audiophlle audio is among the very few things where the next improved version of anything is also more expensive , that does not happen elsewhere (broad generalisation sorry ). I do have some fun at some audiophile companies revelling about how they used this extremely expensive labour intensive and awkward and costly method to do something ,that can in it's own right be complicated precision engineering . but maybe not the smartest thing to do , but the audiophile demand expensive engineering artefacts . A good analogy is a handmade mechanical swiss watch vs a casio watch in cheerfull moulded plastic if you want to keep time . I do want a swiss watch but not for keeping time :) for reference my HT processor is now 9 years old speakers are newer but originally designed back then but i have a much later version . Thats good enginerring i just had to add a separate hdmi coprocessor to keep it up to date . One the greater audiophile myths of all time is that there is a fast and important development in [insert any product category ] and that yesterday product somehow have been left in the dust digital had its period of rapid development in the 80-90's transistor amps in the 70-80s . You do usually get some improvement when you change out something 20 years old but it may just show that the thing is 20 years old not that its bacisc desgn is dated :) I would for example have no problem using speakers designed 20 years ago . What do improve is production methods and thus the price of components and products on never technology until they reach a level where mass-market is comfortable paying , eg flat TV the cost what they cost but you get a bigger one next year . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97950
_______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
