Quote:
Originally Posted by regal
A watt is a watt basically the 1st law of thermodynamics. There is a guy who will pay you $10,000 if you can tell the difference between any two amps both set to the same watts of output. No one has ever won his challenge.
I have always been on the fence about digital sources. I used to think all digital sources sound the same, then I heard SACD which is much better than RBCD on my sources. That made me wonder what a good RBCD player would sound like.
But then my reciever converts any analog signal to digital to do the subwoofer crossover DSP so any benefit having a CDP with a super DAC would be pretty much negated. Yes I could find a super low jitter CDP to use as a transport but I doubt there would be a great enhancement in sound. This among other things lsent me to Headphones, even though my only experience is with $10 crappy headsets. You don't have to worry about DSP for subs so in theory you should be able to benefit from a digital source with an outstanding DAC. Won't know until I try. But I am starting conservative to see if I can stand listening to headphones: AV710,LDM+, ATH M30.
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What I believe about low-jitter transports today is that it is just really a brute force expensive solution to what really was a simple problem. Today some transports use a CD-ROM drive (or the like) with high speed read capability and a buffer to simply keep everything timed properly. I don't fully understand in detail the issues, but I heard that a Hard Drive + USB DAC is very low jitter if implemented properly for two reasons. Firstly, the hard drive can read data at speeds far higher than 1x CD, and USB has two communication and buffers allowing for "perfect" timing of the bits.
So IMHO, or AFAIK spending thousands on a top-quality transport is almost anachronistic anymore. In fact I really wonder why it took so many years for these audio companies to just adopt PC techology on the transport side instead of building these "bank vault" transports for $$$$$$. I suspect that they wanted to milk the "bank vault" market for as long as they could, and they knew that brute force overengineering is intrinsically appealing to the audiophile mindset.
Mind you I say all this while owning a large 70lb CD player myself that I am happy with. All I'm saying is that if you are getting into the hobby now, you have cheaper options. Also in the spirit of this thread it is always good to evaluate the typical audiophile conventional wisdom yourself to hopefully save yourself some money. Don't fall for everything and be careful with your money, but also don't be too quick to dismiss certain facts as the case may be just because the world would be a better place if those facts were not actually true.
In your case with a A-D converting receiver SACD playback will always be compromised as you probably already knew. I guess a cheap used SACD player (those first generation Sonys were good the money) into a headphone amp or a good pair of phones will really shine.
As for a watt being a watt, and thermodynamics. Yes power is power and pushing a 1Kg mass up 1 meter in a given amount of time requires the application of a given amount of power for a given amount of time, but in audio we are dealing with a varying alternating current signal with complexities that are simply not present in simple mechanics or even with DC currents.
You can believe what you prefer to believe, but just take a brief look at a DIY site like Headwize and see the sorts of decisions designers have to grapple with. They look at things like whether to apply feedback or not. Whether that feedback should be local or global. What the input and output impedances should be. Characteristics of the active devices in so many dimensions like thermal, electrical, voltage, current, slew rate and many more I have no knowledge of. If you take a look at a visual reporesentation of a musical signal waveform, you should immediately recognize the diffcultly involved in amplifying that signal and sending it to a loudspeaker or headphone in that same condition with back EMF from the speakers and what not. There are defintely differences in approaches, whether it results is a large difference and whether that difference is worth the expense is another issue altogether. But IMHO, saying there is no difference with different circuit topologies and part selections is not true.