Thanks for the info Shardorne. I've often had trouble finding something that makes logical sense in the audioworld... ;-) I've heard the argument that a transport reads a 1 or a 0 and the distance between them make the note (or is subject to error) - like an analogue record player. This is a digital medium, not an etched vinyl record. Wow and flutter shouldn't affect the digital signal to the DAC when it has correction data, right? It would be great to be located somewhere with enough equipment that I could just sit down and blind compare a discman (assuming it had digital out) and a krell transport to the same DAC.
- ...
- 27 posts total
Crudo20, You are correct - transport wow and flutter do not matter. It can run at any speed as long as it is fast enough to ensure the digital buffer does not run out. Just as you will not run out of hot water if your boiler/heater tops up the hot water quickly enough. As for a discman digital out....yes it should be as good as the best...after all it is digital and that is the beauty of digital...digital preserves the original data perfectly. A caveat, this is provided the DAC conversion is using its own digital ref clock to clock out the buffered bits and not slave to the clock signal from the discman....the discman clock might be less robust than a high quality DAC. A variable clock signal gives jitter and therefore distortion in some rare cases (badly designed equipment) See this link for a good overview http://www.tc.umn.edu/~erick205/Papers/paper.html#jitter |
Does the apple airport express provide a quick enough & accurate digital signal for DAC purposes?In my system, it certainly sounds like it does. For a published, numbers-based opinion, go to Stereophile's website and search on Airport Express for a 2005 John Atkinson commentary. He says the AX output is bit-by-bit identical to an original WAV file. (Note that this also means Apple Lossless compression is bit-perfect, since iTunes streams everything to AX in AL compressed format.) |
- 27 posts total