@burtlake
Interesting discussion and the tech is tempting to try out. One question; doesn’t the DSP do it’s own A/D and D/A conversion? After spending a relatively large sum on a DAC, it seems counterproductive to have the signal reconverted twice more downstream by a much lower cost device… am I off-base here?
@erik_squires
Depends really on where you do the DSP. If you use Roon for instance, you do it all before the streamer gets the data. If you use a DSP capable streamer/DAC then no difference. If you use it only for the subwoofer (like I often do) then it’s out of the way of the main DAC/Amp chain
Running DSP software on a Mac/PC source is similar to using a streamer (which is just a dedicated computer) as a source, everything is done in the digital domain upstream of your DAC.
The current line of miniDSP boxes running Dirac (like minDSP Flex and SHD) take digital in (USB/Toslink/SPDIF coax on Flex, plus Ethernet and AES-EBU on SHD) and do the DAC job themselves. Because you send them a digital signal, there’s no redundant ADC/DAC conversion stages. There’s also a studio model of their SHD which sends digital to a downstream DAC. The SHD models use a 96 kHz internal sample rate, so a Mac/PC can theoretically do better (Dirac and Sonarworks say 192 kHz there). The Flex uses 96 kHz also but says 48 kHz with Dirac licence, that may be across the board for their stuff?
I was using Tidal and thought about MQA but that makes DSP hard, fortunately Apple decided to do hi-res (and multichannel Atmos) on Mac around that time which made for a very simple setup (and I was happy to entirely avoid the AVP/AVR world). But consequently I can’t say anything useful about sonics via the miniDSP devices.
