Can Digital beat our Analog installations?

czarivey, we're discussing clock cables connecting our wordclocks to the dac and trans...the cables aren't themselves the clock...

Thuchan, I am with you. I have great analog and a great digital set up, To me, it depends on the software which is better...digital has come a long long way...I can only imagine how the Vivaldi improves on our Scarlatti...I'd love to try the dCS Vivaldi DAC...keeping my dCS Scarlatti clock and trans...

Jfrech and Thuchan, while I agree that the software plays a huge role, I feel like I have to point out an often overlooked issue:

We often see very well done digital recordings. They sound amazing, and seem to challenge analog reproduction. The question though really is- what would this same recording sound like if the master was analog instead of digital? I ask this because you might be surprised at how modest the record chain can be in an excellent digital recording (although there are recordings that sport some high end hardware in the record chain too). What I am getting at here is how easily a good analog recording system can best the best of digital. It can do it in a heartbeat.

If you are playing an LP that has a digital master, it quite often can sound better than the CD simply because it is mastered from the master file and has less data loss. But you really aren't hearing what that LP can do unless it also has an analog master.

The topic has been beat to death here over the last couple years. Not much new to say unless specific questions asked or making specific comparisons of specific products as opposed to digital versus analog in general.

"I'll go out on a limb and say wireless wi-fi connection is dramatically inferior"

Better climb back in a little.

I am a fan of the DCS Ring DAC technology...just waiting to be able to afford it again someday maybe.

Meanwhile my non oversampling mhdt Constantine DAC (<$400 used) does the job quite nicely for me and does not sound "digital".

Czarivey,

To lock the DAC to a word clock signal, it is necessary to synchronise the DAC's internal clock with a Phase-Locked Loop. You cannot do that directly from (for example) an SPDIF cable carrying digital audio. Therefore you are using separate wordclocking cables going from the sources (CD, DAT, Upsampler, Laptop etc.) to the Dac or to a Master Clock (here including the Dac as source - in slaving mode).

Wordclock is "something digital" -SPDIF see under Wikipedia