Quote: Its not as simple as you think and i do believe you need to be a engineer in order to make comments like this, or at least have some basic understanding to know how difficult these sigma delta modulators work. These are not ladder dacs and require some insane amount of knowledge...

My above statement should be correct, it was quoted from the person who made the m-dac in the first place, i first thought that resolution would be lost due to bits being thrown away but he said this is not the case due to noise shaping, which is a feature done by dsd.

The attenuation is done at the digital level yes but is done in a way that is actually better in my opinion than that of analogue attenuation.    This is what is thought by most and i did at the beginning as well..   "If 1 bit is lost for every 6db then at -24db 4 bits is lost from the...

Currently just been discussing that over on pinkfish media forums, it has been said the balanced outputs do give better sound quality and they have been discussing relative theory's why this is. Good read.

Quote: Il have a look into that thanks.

Quote: Yea but this is not classed as pre amplification, its just the source signal.

As far as i know this dac only has a passive preamp as there is no actual amplification stage at the outputs, so what i am asking since its not a active preamp and is just a digital potentiometer what kind of differences are there when you bypass the PASSIVE preamp audio quality wise.

Read through the whole thread and have some questions about the m-dac, as i have read the DAC's digital preamp affects the sound quality and when you bypass it, it improves the quality. Can someone shed some light on why as i would have though being attenuated on a digital level that it would...