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Its all in the DAC?

Hello All,
I currently own a Pioneer Elite DV45a. The DAC in the Pioneer sounds grainy in my system. When I use it as transport only to my B&K ref 50, the sound quality and stage opens up and sounds much better. I use my system for both 2 channel and HT. I am considering a reference quality CD palyer; but it seems to me that the quality of the sound is really in the DAC and not the transport. As long as the DAC can discern between 1 and 0 from the transport and the clocks are in sync between the transport and the DAC, which should be the case for most modern CD players, I should be able to get reference quality sound by just adding a high quality DAC to my system. If there is any jitter in the system at all, the DAC should have enough de-jitter buffer space to take care of it. Do you agree?
tfee
jkphoto
167 posts
 
The better the transport, and the less the DAC has to worry about jitter, the better the DAC can do its job. They are both important ... but if I was upgrading one at a time, I would do the DAC first.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
How does "grainy" sound?
phild
603 posts
 
Hi Tfee, the DAC is important, but the transport is equally important. The actual DAC chips in that Pioneer unit are good...the problems are due to the cheap parts and crappy implementation. If the DAC or transport you replace it with is not better in those areas, the sound will not improve much. People like Ric Schultz (from EVS...tweakaudio.com) modify those players. They make changes to many of the half-assed aspects of the transport, DAC, power supply, circuitry, etc. and turn them into completely different sounding players (with the exact same features).

As far as the tranport goes...if it's not good, it may turn a 0 into a 1, or vice versa, and I imagine jitter does the same thing. THe better the transport, the more 1's and 0's it will read correctly.
murphthelab
21 posts
 
As a former industry expert on jitter in high-speed digital telecommunication systems, I always get sucked into these type of questions.... ;-)

It's key to understand that jitter on the 1/0 signal from the transport does not end when it hits the DAC, despite buffering. The clock that times the bits OUT from the DAC is derived from the input clock. The DAC represents a filter. Filtering jitter is not easy and it is never perfect. Jitter = distortion on the analog signal (discernable or not).
kana813
956 posts
 
I have a 45A, even stock it never sounded "grainy," but it
did improve with some better parts in the power supply,
replacement of the cheap coupling caps, IEC connector for
a better PC, damping and decent ICs. Others(on the yahoo tact users group) report improvements using ERS sheets placed around the power supply and on the DAC.

Also, be sure to switch off the video section, when listening to CDs, DVD-As and SACDs.
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