Viventis wrote: > There should be no difference at all. Digital is digital. Your > receiver's DAC will decode each the same. The big difference is in the > Touch's analog output. The DAC in the Touch is excellent, even better > than that found in many receivers.
I beg to differ. Getting the 1s and 0s from your Touch to your DAC is quite a challenge (there is no such thing as a digital *SIGNAL*, it is an analogue carrier modulating small changes in voltages representing binary information), especially over the poorly designed interfaces that are TOSLINK and SPDIF. One will be better than the other depending on the implementation and your cabling. TOSLINK optical cables come in two flavours, plastic and glass. The outer sheath will also make a difference, the light path is affected by the reflective and refractive indicies of the cable - take a glass and a plastic cable and listen - easily demonstrable difference in audio quality. No need to spend silly money on a glass cable though - Stan Beresford sells a very good one for example. In my system TOSLINK comes a poor second to a coax connection. I am using a Touch connected to an Audiolab 8200CDQ and the optical connection sounds flat, dull and lifeless. The SPDIF path is crippled by the fact that it SHOULD be a 75Ohm impedance connection, but considering that RCA plugs are not 75ohms and neither is the circuit up to the RCAs, there's not much chance of avoiding signal reflections between one end and the other. Using different lengths of cable will go some way to alleviating the problems this causes - A lot of people report 1.5m as being the optimum length of coax cable, but again, the cable you use will make a difference. I've tried various coax cables from the likes of Chord, Kontak Link and QED, but so far, my home brewed cable using Belden satellite coax at 0.5 metres has worked best for me. It's not something I could pick up quickly in an A/B test, but certainly, over the course of an evenings listening, the Belden has had me enjoying my music louder and for longer. Just my experiences - YMMV of course, but keep your ears and mind open. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ lovejoy's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=47846 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95872 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
