[linuxworks]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiToNi /img/forum/go_quote.gif For those who think digital connections is just a matter of 0's and 1's should read John Atkinson's article on the subject in one of the early issues of Stereophile this year (Jan/Feb I think and available online, "jitter" something).

the reviewers have not kept up. they like to sing the same old jitter song. gives them something to blame. they like that

jitter is a non-problem in any decent dac, today. long since solved. buffering in the dac and local reclocking solve the problem.

but that won't stop the WRITERS. writers. heh. not designers or builders.

I don't trust writers. I used to be one (lol).

 

[audioqueso]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sonci /img/forum/go_quote.gif Or because the Chaintech and RME are both good, it would be interesting if you could try the motherboard spidf out..

Why would it be interesting to try out a motherboard spdif? I just compared the optical out of a $20 soundcard vs a $500 soundcard. It's a $20 soundcard. If someone is so cheap that they can't spend the $20s for a soundcard, why are they even in this hobby where speakers and headphones cost tons more?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sonci /img/forum/go_quote.gif I really believe in B&W, but you should try some good headphones, for making that comparison..

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Sounds futile.

 

[EugeneK]

From what I'm reading, a lot of the mid priced sound cards lack the ability to do bit-perfect output: that means to say take the 44.1khz music stream and spit it out to 44.1khz s/pdif without up/downsampling in the process. The audio stream has to be passed through the chipset which likely up or down samples the stream when it is passed through the digital signal processor.

There is a cheap set of audio chipsets by cmedia that have drivers where no audio processing is done to the audiostream at all.

More info is at: Bitperfect - cmediadrivers - "Bitperfect" / "bit-exact" explained - Project Hosting on Google Code

I'm going to test this stuff out. I bought one of those cards for $40. Not too bad if it doesn't work out anyway.

 

[neouser]

I checked some Musiland reviews (chinese), and the performance seems good but not perfect. I think that for Spdif digital signal transmission there are some limit values regarding SNR/THD etc, a perfect digital output, when checked with RMAA for example (taking in account RMAA error), should perform exactly as the limit specs the sample rate have. Still, my ALC1200 coaxial motherboard output performs perfectly (0.0000thd etc), but it makes my keces 131.1 conversion awful. Instead the Steadyclock spdif coaxial/optical out of the RME 9632 makes its conversion perform as it should.

I'm going soon to post some graphs since the difference between the two digital outputs it's not in numbers, but in graphs, so someone with more knowledge could tell me what's going on.

However, regarding my experience, the reply to the OP title is NO, there are differences in quality.

Marco

 

[joe_cool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linuxworks /img/forum/go_quote.gif jitter is a non-problem in any decent dac, today. long since solved. buffering in the dac and local reclocking solve the problem.

I would like to know which of your DACS have buffering and reclocking (Lavry DA10 costs about $1100).

 

[tosehee]

Benchmark does have a perfect jitter correction. Other than them, I do not know which DAC fixes the jitter to 100%.

 

[linuxworks]

Quote:

Originally Posted by joe_cool /img/forum/go_quote.gif I would like to know which of your DACS have buffering and reclocking (Lavry DA10 costs about $1100).

I believe ALL of the modern chip-based ones do.

bantam dac and amb y1/y2 (pcm burr-brown chip as well as the wolfson dac chips).

not only the dac but the spdif receiver chip de-jitters (8416).

it does not have *external* circuitry like lavry but I'm not 100% convinced that, today, you NEED external dejitter stuff. chips have buffering, pll, and all the stuff that you used to have to put outside the chips.

my understanding is that lavry (et al) wanted to do better than the off the shelf chips; but that's not to say the current breed of chips are not also doing the same basic kinds of things. not in exactly the same way, of course, but there are many ways to skin a cat.

the ESS chip is also supposed to be very jitter proof.