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Your soundcard (as a DAC) is a superb piece of digital audio kit, it has actual verified levels of noise, distortion and linearity so exemplary that a separate DAC would be a total waste of money
Nick, if I may ask, do you think that good measurements are the warrant of the best SQ? The better the measurements, the better the gear sounds in your opinion/experience?
A good DAC in my view does not have a sound, it takes the digital signal and correctly decodes it and neither adds nor takes away, it does not add distortion or noise (at audible levels shall we say) and it produces the frequency spectra without (notable) deviations, some folks call this neutral or transparent, so if a recording is bright as many original instrument C17th small orchestra pieces are (and sometimes this can be irritating to modern ears) then you get that bright sound, you can always EQ, I choose not to.
Have you heard the STX?
Nope but my opinion would be far less valuable than actual measurements. Actually my opinion would be utterly useless to everyone it would be dependent on my tonal preferences and not transferable to anyone else, nor would you have any guarantee that what I heard and reported was an accurate picture of reality.
The weaknesses of the STX are well known, and have been debated many times in the past...IME(and many others), even a Prodigy HD2 sounds much "better" as in less harsh and bright.
Perhaps you just do not like the sound as originally recorded, it seems unlikey to me that an accurate soundcard would add harshness or brightness, that would be pretty obvious from any test of the FR ?
But more fundamentally how do you do these comparisons ? and how do you make sure they are consistent and fair ? How do you know that your expectations are not altering your perceptions ?
Might this be due to the two discrete clocks(that are exact multiples of 44.1/48kHz) of the HD2 or to the fact that the DSP used in the STX carries a 700ps jitter spec in its datasheet is of course m00t...we all know that clocks frequencies and jitter don't matter
700ps according to currently published controlled jitter audibility studies is trivial, in any case any incipient jitter shows up in IMD and THD downstream and the STX does very well here, actually IMD and THD are so much bigger than jitter that they swamp it,. viz when you look at the random noise or discrete sidebands create by poor jitter performance and then view the extra grunty from THD and IMD for the same item they are concommitantly poor, of course none of this tells you if these failings are audible...
I'm personally eagerly awaiting 150dB SNR internal soundcards, they'll sound far better than anything we currently own fosho.
There are limits to human hearing, 150db is great but would you be able to tell the difference against a mere 120db ?
