astrostar59
BannedMember of the Trade: Aries Cerat Espana, Auriculares High-EndAKA Headstage, headphoneweekend
darn (again lol) i found i have been wasteing many time for cheap bad sounding a USB DAC.
today i found cheap Marantz CD player sound much much better than my cheap USB DAC. darn
also i waste Suzuki-san(Chief Engineer of Stax)'s precious times by me asking him some my nonsense questions about it....darn
FYI Mac + some cheap USB DAC combo can waste your time and can sound badder than some cheap traditional CD Players. Stax HPs can hear its differences easily....so please be aware.
hope this someones helps.
This does not really apply in all cases. But generally to compete with a half decent CDP you need an well optimised PC with good PS and decent player software, and a good USB board in the DAC. It has got better of late, but there are still issues with many USB boards IMO, even in 2K+ DACs.
I dropped out of the USB chain for this reason TBH. Some fixers, convertors or de-crappiifiers help, but not IMO totally get rid of the USB 'issue'. It is the price and hassle factor we pay for having access to our libraries in an instant or via Tidal.
But with some work, you can get better SQ than most CDPs, remember a CDP is basically reading the same data at live speeds, so not totally perfect. And of course most CDPs use SPDIF not USB. I am past my CDP SQ now, definitely, no question.