[Cousin Patty]

The way I see it... I don't want to have an internal PCI soundcard be better or equal to CDP'S costing thousands of dollars. Listening to music is a huge part of my life and everything but, I like to have shiny pieces of equipment like DACs and amps along side my computer. It wouldnt be any fun if an internal soundcard was able to do everything on its own. Besides, I thought the whole draw of computer based audio was that you didnt have to spend alot of money on a soundcard to get great sound because actually using the sound card as a DAC wasnt necessary? Id rather spend alot of money on high quality external equipment. The best way is to use the PC as a transport to an external DAC. To answer the question, I dont know if the best soundcard is as good as some of the really highend CDP's. But I also think it doesnt matter.

 

[audioengr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal I don't understand the argument for an internal DAC(soundcard), no way that can compete. However the digitalout from computer to external DAC has merit. The question I have is how much jitter is introduced going from harddrive to digital out of the computer?

First, the hard drive has nothing to do with the jitter in the playback. The data is streamed from memory through the CPU accumulator-I/O buffers.

Second, the jitter is a function of the USB protocol, the converter PLL and the associated buffering and cabling. These can all add jitter, as well as the PC board design and power delivery to these parts.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer

 

[regal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by audioengr First, the hard drive has nothing to do with the jitter in the playback. The data is streamed from memory through the CPU accumulator-I/O buffers. Second, the jitter is a function of the USB protocol, the converter PLL and the associated buffering and cabling. These can all add jitter, as well as the PC board design and power delivery to these parts. Steve N. Empirical Audio Manufacturer

So has this ever been measured? How does it compare to a decent CDP?

 

[Garbz]

I haven't seen a generalised case. But the effects have been measured before. But they also apply to a cdplayer. Jitter is also a function of the chip design. e.g. Thoes huge 200pin FPGA chips which controll everything in a cdplayer are significantly worse then lots of external purpose built chips. But the FPGA option is significantly cheaper.

Skipping ahead past all the stuff I didn't read

, I firmly believe the best computer soundcard won't come anywhere near the best CDplayer, simply because the computer is an uncontrolled environment with severe limitations, whereas the inside of a cdplayer is designed for 1 purpose, audio reproduction. The most basic example of this is the computer with it's switching supply, and a really good cdplayer with 1-4 huge torroids followed by oodles of linear regulation and filtering.

A CDplayer is designed to reproduce sound, Where as a soundcard is designed to poor voltages, poor supply, EMI/RFI, etc etc.