nigeljames
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2007
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Quote:
Hi Covenant
Just to be clear the Pico never becomes the source!
The Pico's job is to convert the digital information into analogue yes but it does not produce the original digital data and therefore has to rely on the source to retrieve that information first and then pass it to the Pico.
The source would be the CD Transport or the motherboard bus depending on where the information is stored.
As West726 never stated that he only uses data stored on the Macbook I assumed that he would also use cd's directly via the cd drive and therefore the drive transport would play a part in the audio process at least some of the time.
In a comparision with an turntable based system the transport would be the equivalent to a stylus and cartridge. Now I am not saying that the transport is going to have as big an influence as the stylus and cartridge comparison but a transport thats designed purely for audio would be better at retrieving audio data. The differences probably would not be major but I do think significant. Reducing the need for error correction and leading, in my experience, to a more focused cleaner sound.
I have heard cd-r's burnt via a audio only cd recorder that has a small but obvious sound quality improvment over the same cd-r burnt via a computer cd recorder (recorded at the slowest speed).
I stand by my opinion that if the OP uses CD's he would be better of upgrading his source. If he just uses computer audio then yes it would not be practical.
Originally Posted by Covenant /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm sorry, but this is misinformation. To make things clear here, the Pico is serving two roles in his setup - amp, and source. His source is not his Macbook, as you've stated. The Macbook is his transport. Lets look at things from a CD player perspective. You insert a disk, which has digital information on it. A laser mechanism reads the disk. This part of the CD player is the transport. That data then gets sent on to the DAC - digital to analogue converter - which converts the 1's and 0's into analogue waveforms. The analogue signal then gets amplified to a 2V line level by an output stage, and sent to the analogue outputs of the player. This part of the CD player is the source. When looked at like this, you can see that the only role that the transport serves is getting the digital data off the disk bit-perfectly to pass on to the DAC - aka, without losing any bits. A computer is perfectly capable of doing this just as well as any expensive optical drive used in high end CD players. For USB dacs like the Pico, all the connected computer is doing is passing in a digital signal. The critical part is how well the digital to analogue conversion goes, and to a lesser degree, the quality of the output stage following it. To summarise, yes he is being held back by the AMP section in the Pico. But no, he is not being held back by his source - not to any significant degree anyway. |
Hi Covenant
Just to be clear the Pico never becomes the source!
The Pico's job is to convert the digital information into analogue yes but it does not produce the original digital data and therefore has to rely on the source to retrieve that information first and then pass it to the Pico.
The source would be the CD Transport or the motherboard bus depending on where the information is stored.
As West726 never stated that he only uses data stored on the Macbook I assumed that he would also use cd's directly via the cd drive and therefore the drive transport would play a part in the audio process at least some of the time.
In a comparision with an turntable based system the transport would be the equivalent to a stylus and cartridge. Now I am not saying that the transport is going to have as big an influence as the stylus and cartridge comparison but a transport thats designed purely for audio would be better at retrieving audio data. The differences probably would not be major but I do think significant. Reducing the need for error correction and leading, in my experience, to a more focused cleaner sound.
I have heard cd-r's burnt via a audio only cd recorder that has a small but obvious sound quality improvment over the same cd-r burnt via a computer cd recorder (recorded at the slowest speed).
I stand by my opinion that if the OP uses CD's he would be better of upgrading his source. If he just uses computer audio then yes it would not be practical.