Is the DAC the digital equivalent of a cartridge.
I'm thoroughly convinced that the closest thing to the source of the music/sound is most important component. I'm an analog vinyl guy, but am looking into digital, and was just wondering if DACs have the same influence on the sound because it's as close to the source as the cartridge is.
The room and speakers are the instruments you hear from, but the DAC is how the signal gets created. There are people who can hear through bad rooms and mediocre speaker selections but I sure can't. While this is in a way a debate similar to "which would you rather have, a heart or a pair of lungs?" the room biases everything else. |
The streamer is the closest thing and equivalent to the turntable. DAC = Phonostage. The sound relationships are pretty much analogous as source and first stage processing, with the addional point being if you don’t get it right at the source it is not going to get better. In upgrading and learning about digital since the advent of the CD, it has become more obvious how analogous they are… particularly now that high end digital can compete with analog. My analog and digital ends have outstanding and very very similar sound quality. The cost breakdown (and I did not just arbitrarily throw money at it ) Streamer $22K - DAC $17K Turntable $20K - phonostage $17K I assure you that if the streamer value was halved the sound quality to ~$10K, the digital end sound quality falls precipitously. I have tried it. Also I increased the DAC cost from $17K to $22K and got virtually identical results. Of course you cannot abstract this to all systems… but I have done a lot of work to minimize the cost of each of my components and get the most sound quality.
There has been and continues to be a strong intellectual attraction to thinking bits are bits and the streamer can’t matter. I was seduced for a very long time by that concept although my 50 year history showed me over and over again never to let that be your guide… listen to the sound. What can I say, logic can get in the way. |
I guess you could say the DAC combines elements of the cartridge (generator) and phono stage (processing and output stage). But yeah, like @edcyn said it may be a fun analogy for a minute, but not really worth further exploration. I run analog only here, and everything matters. However I can express at least some surprise that the cartridge and even table (past a certain point - basic tables and cartridges will hold you way way back) don’t matter MORE than they do, in the face of the specific matching of cartridge to an arm, and also the proper matching of that to a top-class phono stage (and SUT where applicable). Then you have isolation considerations, which can either matter a whole lot or not that much depending on context. When I’ve played with digital, I didn’t go very far, but I’ve been consistently surprised how much the transport seems to matter, even more than the DAC itself in some cases. |
