Candlemass wrote: > Tell it the audio engineers in the studio :p > They are creating the information. That's something else than not distorting it. After the audio engineer has worked on it the music often sounds nothing like the raw material he got at all.
> > Why does it matter if you have a DAC, an amplifier and a speaker or a > DAC and an amplifier inside your speaker? :rolleyes: Your chain does not > get shorter this way, it's just built in one box instead of three boxes. That's not true. You save two important parts which account for the biggest part of the loss in an audio chain today: 1. Cables. As mentioned above, for a line level signal that's not negligible at all. Even with balanced outputs/inputs there still can and will be EMC issues over several meters. That goes away if the DAC is in the speaker. 2. Passive filters. Probably the number 1. If your amp is not matched to the speaker (and actually to each driver within the speaker) you need to use a passive, analog filter to separate the frequencies and to match the signal with the frequency response of the speaker. Passive filters are very, very limited compared to digital ones so you have to stack a lot of them or build huge speakers with a very linear frequency response or you have to use one-way wideband speakers. Stacking lots of filters creates lots of losses. Building huge speakers is not very practical and wideband speakers are usually limited in power. Especially #2 trumps whatever you can do with DACs, power supplies, cables, whatever. Not worth looking at any of these if you later introduce signal losses a few orders of magnitude higher. In very, very high end systems you sometimes use separate amps per driver or speakers with a linear response but we are talking about stuff you buy at the cost of a car or so. And why would you even want to do that in a new design today, now that you can just match the amp with the speaker since it's cheap enough to put two or three amps into a speaker housing? --- learn more about iPeng, the iPhone and iPad remote for the Squeezebox and Logitech UE Smart Radio as well as iPeng Party, the free Party-App, at penguinlovesmusic.com *New: iPeng 7, the Universal App for iOS 7* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101924 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
