ProtegeManiac
Headphoneus Supremus
Given my recent work sched, I decided to move some of the gears in my full speaker rig into the computer where I spend much of my time nowadays. Setting aside the Icon Mobile for use with the laptop and Zen when I'm out, I set-up a Non-OS DAC-AH (the one modified by Ferds, bought it from the original owner) and my NAD304 to drive my headphones.
Once I got it running, I noticed the distorted (meaning hte effects pedal) guitars sounded...well, distorted. Meaning it sounded like a wave of fuzzy humming on a lot of tracks, and I can't hear the individual notes on the fast riffs. The Icon Mobile did better at this albeit a darker tone on the guitars. I decided to play around the settings and eventually I noticed the sound was cleaner if I set the sound card to output 24bit/96khz. 192khz was a bit thin-sounding. This is just built into the mboard as this is my gaming rig, on-going house renovations have kept my media center boxed, and this one uses a Toslink SPDIF output.
Now this is when I scratch my head. This DAC and amp was previously used with my Marantz CD60, signals were transmitted via the same cables, except now my47Labs OTA coax is not in use anymore. In any case, why would a non-OS DAC with no OS chip in the circuit get a more detailed signal from a soundcard that's sending out an oversampled (192khz) and upsampled (24bit? Not really sure if the card can do that) signal? My Marantz outputs native 16bit although I think it oversamples at 96khz. And i was actually hoping I could keep everything at native resolution and sample rates.
Once I got it running, I noticed the distorted (meaning hte effects pedal) guitars sounded...well, distorted. Meaning it sounded like a wave of fuzzy humming on a lot of tracks, and I can't hear the individual notes on the fast riffs. The Icon Mobile did better at this albeit a darker tone on the guitars. I decided to play around the settings and eventually I noticed the sound was cleaner if I set the sound card to output 24bit/96khz. 192khz was a bit thin-sounding. This is just built into the mboard as this is my gaming rig, on-going house renovations have kept my media center boxed, and this one uses a Toslink SPDIF output.
Now this is when I scratch my head. This DAC and amp was previously used with my Marantz CD60, signals were transmitted via the same cables, except now my47Labs OTA coax is not in use anymore. In any case, why would a non-OS DAC with no OS chip in the circuit get a more detailed signal from a soundcard that's sending out an oversampled (192khz) and upsampled (24bit? Not really sure if the card can do that) signal? My Marantz outputs native 16bit although I think it oversamples at 96khz. And i was actually hoping I could keep everything at native resolution and sample rates.
