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Greetings from Russia!

Now at me headphones Sennheiser HD280pro, they are connected to AV reciver Yamaha 420 (dac akm ak4527vo), the receiver is connected on spdif to a computer. On a computer it is used onboard soundcard realtek ac97. I wish to collect USBDAC on a microcircuit pcm2702 and amplifier PPA.

Whether the sound in the best party in comparison with reciver yamaha 420 will change?

Excuse for bad English.

 

[Garbz]

привет and welcome.

Generally there is more to consider then just the DAC chip. I can't say that the PCM2702 will out perform the ak4527, however it will out perform the Yamaha receiver. This is mainly because of the way receivers are designed. They are generally noisy, have poor powersupplies, and sacrafice sound quality in favour of features.

The PCM2702 + PPA will sound better then the Yamaha 420, I am certain of that even without knowing what it sounds like.

 

[Francis_Vaughan]

I would second the above. There is far more to the quality of the sound than the actual DAC chip. Indeed the evidence is that the actual choice of chip itself is perhaps the least important.

For instance I have a DAC with an AK4528 (M-Audio USB Audiophile) and a DAC with a PCM2705 (Apple Airport Express.) Although not exactly the same as your comparison, they are very very close, and for the most part identical. However the implementation of the surrounding circuits is very different. And, hardly surprising, the Airport Express sounds quite poor in comparison to the M-Audio DAC. The M-Audio takes a lot of care, has much better layout, power supply, output buffering etc etc. The Airport express is built into a very small enclosure right next to lots of RF generating circuits, has little to no attention paid to the power supply, and has no output buffer (relying on the internal CMOS op-amps). Its only redeeming feature is that it can also supply S/PDIF. (With all the mixed issues that entails.) Even then the M-Audio DAC is nothing special. It uses 5532 op-amps for everything, which is not great. And has generic electrolytic capacitors for coupling. Much could be done to improve it. But fed into my PPA V2 and driving my HD650s, it sounds very good. A carefully implemented PCM2702 based DAC would be expected to perform easily as well. But no matter how much work is done, eventually a single chip DAC like the PCM270x family is compromised by the trade-offs needed to put it all on one die.