[Binaural Fusion]

I've been comparing my two sources to my DAC, my Audigy 4 Pro, and my Rega Apollo. I notice the Apollo sounds much less hashy and stronger through the power region and bass. I have my soundcard outputting bit perfect and I'm playing WAVs through iTunes. Any idea what is causing it?

 

[003]

1. I think the Audigy 4 pro is similar to the Audigy2 in that it resamples the digital data to 48khz internally and then back to the sample rate you are expecting before the signal is sent on it's way to the DAC.

2. There is also much more noise and interference inside a computer than there is in a CDP. You might want to wrap the sound card with ERS paper, though I wouldn't bother with such a low quality card. In this case I think the quality degradation is largely attributed to point number one.

Are you using the same kind of digital connection between the sound card and DAC and CDP and DAC?

Also, you are probably getting a lot more jitter from the A4.

 

[Binaural Fusion]

1. I turned resampling off, hopefully the card still isn't (but who knows).
2. Any suggestions for a card that would be better suited to this?

And I'm not using the same connection, I use coax from my CDP > DAC, and optical from my comp (cause I was getting extra noise over coax from comp).

 

[003]

Ideally you want coax in both cases if you can isolate the noise. Maybe ERS paper wouldn't be such a bad idea but you need to ditch that sound card first.

Unless the music you are playing was recorded at 48khz, when you play music from anything in the Audigy series, the digital signal is resampled to 48KHz in the dsp (its the only sample rate it's dsp can work with), and then once it does whatever it does, it is resampled again to whatever your specified sample rate was.

A temporary fix for this is to use high quality software resampling to resample your audio to 48khz, and thus eliminate the need of the DSP to do any resampling. You need foobar 0.8.3. NOT 0.9.x, otherwise it won't work as well. PM me for details.

 

[brokensound]

Have you set the volume to max on your sound card? That usually helps with the dynamics. Otherwise, the sound card might be picking up crap from the mobo and what not. ERS paper would help cure that.

 

[Cyrilix]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 003 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Ideally you want coax in both cases if you can isolate the noise. Maybe ERS paper wouldn't be such a bad idea but you need to ditch that sound card first. Unless the music you are playing was recorded at 48khz, when you play music from anything in the Audigy series, the digital signal is resampled to 48KHz in the dsp (its the only sample rate it's dsp can work with), and then once it does whatever it does, it is resampled again to whatever your specified sample rate was. A temporary fix for this is to use high quality software resampling to resample your audio to 48khz, and thus eliminate the need of the DSP to do any resampling. You need foobar 0.8.3. NOT 0.9.x, otherwise it won't work as well. PM me for details.

And why is this?

I use foobar2000 0.9.4.3 with SSRC resampler set to resample to 96 KHz (Ultra quality level), and it works perfectly fine. What do you mean?