[funkymartyn]

Hi firstly excuse my title, from a uk tv advert.....anyway my point of this post is just to say looking over a few of the posts, pictures in show my head fi station, I cant understand why after having all this top kit, amps, headphones, etc......Most people seem to only use a source fed from a pc, lap top, or small portable, even a phone, ?

 

[wuwhere]

In a nutshell. The content is in digital. The pc, laptop, etc... are essentially just storage medium with software that feeds a DAC that converts the digital signal to analog signal that is amplified by the headphone amp or speaker amp. There could also be a preamp between the DAC and the amp.

 

[funkymartyn]

Thanks for info, but what I was getting at is that the source is only low quality in first place....then being beefed up.... I can understand say using a phone or mini disc, mp3 player etc, but then go into a Topping nx1, or Fiio e11k, etc to feed a decent headphone.....as these are not expensive......would have understood it also to use top amps, dac, etc , if coming from a decent hifi cd player, turntable, .etc..

 

[wuwhere]

If one uses a low quality source vs. a better one, can you hear a difference? Is the difference a better sound to you?

 

[Music Alchemist]

If you're getting at a "vinyl is better" argument, this is false, as far as the medium itself goes. Digital/CD is far superior in every technical aspect. It's just that some vinyl releases are derived from a better-sounding master, which is the reason that people mistakenly think that analog is better. As for digital sources, what I can tell you is that it's far easier (and less expensive) to get excellent fidelity from digital systems than it is to do so with analog ones. Some laptop computers (like mine) sound just as good as many dedicated DACs too, so in some cases, you can get equally good sound connecting directly to an amp.

 

[MindsMirror]

Inexpensive does not mean low quality or bad sounding when it comes to digital players. Digital technology has been around for many decades. You can send and receive perfect copies of data with tens of millions of bits of information, wirelessly, to millions of places across the world, every second, with your internet connection. It should not be at all surprising that an inexpensive digital player from this century can send a relatively small amount of data across a few feet of wire to a DAC without somehow screwing it up. DACs have been around for almost as long, people have gotten pretty good at making them too.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

Like others have said, the storage medium is largely irrelevant with the devices we have now. If you take a Chord Hugo with a pair of HD800s it's gonna sound the same coming out of whatever it's plugged into so long as it's playing the same files. There's no need for big Hi-Fi sources, and well... I will never say anyone is wrong for PREFERRING vinyl, but the instant they try and claim it's a "better" medium...

 

[funkymartyn]

Thanks for comments, no I was not onky getting on about vinyl being better, I did mention also about high end cd players
I just cant get my head roubd playing music, files, down loads etc from a pc, lap top, .....etc...... but thanks anyway.

 

[Music Alchemist]

Thanks for comments, no I was not onky getting on about vinyl being better, I did mention also about high end cd players
I just cant get my head roubd playing music, files, down loads etc from a pc, lap top, .....etc...... but thanks anyway.

 
How can a high-end CD player be better? It's just reading data from the grooves on the disc. Even very cheap CD drives can easily rip a perfect copy of the data from a CD. And digital playback software (such as foobar2000) has bit-perfect playback, so there's no room for improvement. Think about it this way: What about a digital source could be inferior? Computers have very fast processors nowadays, and it barely requires any processing power to play music. If anything, some high-end CD players are inferior due to very high jitter levels. Most modern equipment (including CD players) has inaudibly low jitter levels, though. Some audiophiles will tell you that more expensive DACs deliver more accurate sound, but this is debatable.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

   
How can a high-end CD player be better? It's just reading data from the grooves on the disc. Even very cheap CD drives can easily rip a perfect copy of the data from a CD. And digital playback software (such as foobar2000) has bit-perfect playback, so there's no room for improvement. Think about it this way: What about a digital source could be inferior? Computers have very fast processors nowadays, and it barely requires any processing power to play music. If anything, some high-end CD players are inferior due to very high jitter levels. Most modern equipment (including CD players) has inaudibly low jitter levels, though. Some audiophiles will tell you that more expensive DACs deliver more accurate sound, but this is debatable.

 
Don't forget CD's are also a limited medium, so people who get up in arms about frequency ranges and bitrates should be concerned that the highest end CD player is still "only" playing at 16/44.1 instead of the 24/192 we can get digitally. 
 
Granted, vinyl is an even MORE limited medium...

 

[Music Alchemist]

  Don't forget CD's are also a limited medium, so people who get up in arms about frequency ranges and bitrates should be concerned that the highest end CD player is still "only" playing at 16/44.1 instead of the 24/192 we can get digitally. 
 
Granted, vinyl is an even MORE limited medium...

 
"CD quality" is as good as it gets as far as anything human ears can hear. Convert any 24-bit (etc.) file to Red Book (16-bit / 44.1 kHz) using a program like dBpoweramp and I can guarantee it will sound exactly the same. No one has even been able to reliably distinguish between lossless and 256 kbps AAC under controlled conditions either.
 
Read this article: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

 

[SomeGuyDude]

   
"CD quality" is as good as it gets as far as anything human ears can hear. Convert any 24-bit (etc.) file to Red Book (16-bit / 44.1 kHz) using a program like dBpoweramp and I can guarantee it will sound exactly the same. No one has even been able to reliably distinguish between lossless and 256 kbps AAC under controlled conditions either.
 
Read this article: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

 
That's only greater proof that your fancy CD player isn't any better than any other digital source.
 
Besides, if you're going to start playing the "as far as human ears can hear" then you'd better be prepared to acknowledge that 320kbps is indistinguishable from lossless, but I have a feeling you won't be doing that...

 

[Music Alchemist]

  That's only greater proof that your fancy CD player isn't any better than any other digital source.
 
Besides, if you're going to start playing the "as far as human ears can hear" then you'd better be prepared to acknowledge that 320kbps is indistinguishable from lossless, but I have a feeling you won't be doing that...

 
Read again what I actually said. I already acknowledged that lossy, lossless, and hi-res are indistinguishable from each other. (As long as the lossy files are higher bit rate. 256 kbps AAC is lossy, not to be confused with lossless ALAC. AAC is able to achieve higher compression rates while maintaining quality.) When I said CD quality, I was referring to the Red Book standard of 16-bit / 44.1 kHz, which just about all lossy files follow too.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Thanks for info, but what I was getting at is that the source is only low quality in first place....then being beefed up.... I can understand say using a phone or mini disc, mp3 player etc, but then go into a Topping nx1, or Fiio e11k, etc to feed a decent headphone.....as these are not expensive......would have understood it also to use top amps, dac, etc , if coming from a decent hifi cd player, turntable, .etc..

 

It's a digital host. If there isn't any noise coming through, there's no problem. It's not a signal "getting beefed up" by downstream components - the digital audio signal coming out of a computer or phone serving as a digital server outputting digital audio is the same signal coming out of a Wadia CDP provided you ripped to lossless. If anything the problem will be that a PC has mechanical components like fans and a lot of other things sharing the power supply, hence some people use fanless servers where copper heatpipes connect the CPU to the chassis which then acts as the heatsink, or smartphones as music servers (I put mine in Airplane mode when listening at home), whose only mechanical parts are the phone speakers which aren't in use.

 

Even then the only time I've ever seen the transport being affected by vibrations was when I used a cheap SACDP from Sony based on their 5-disc changer, and the spindle's movement was visibly shaking the plastic arm holding the laser head.

 

 

At the same time, maybe in a speaker set-up having a CDP built like a tank will help a lot considering all the moving parts will be exposed to the soundwaves the speakers are throwing all over the room, but what soundwaves can shake the moving mechanical parts of an audio system coming from headphones? You'd have more to worry about from a cheap or dying HDD making mechanical noises as well as PC fans than the headphone producing soundwaves to rock and vibrate the HDD. At the same time, one reason others use music servers is because of the magical storage of Solid State Drives, which unlike HDDs don't have anything mechanical. Some computers don't have fans, some music servers can take SSDs instead of HDDs, so the only moving parts in that entire system are the headphones themselves. Hell even a speaker system can now use an Android server or an Olive music server (it depends really on how much you can spend and whether you an properly set-up the Android vs the instruction manual that comes wth the Olive, or Marantz, or whatever).

 

[SomeGuyDude]

   
Read again what I actually said. I already acknowledged that lossy, lossless, and hi-res are indistinguishable from each other. (As long as the lossy files are higher bit rate. 256 kbps AAC is lossy, not to be confused with lossless ALAC. AAC is able to achieve higher compression rates while maintaining quality.) When I said CD quality, I was referring to the Red Book standard of 16-bit / 44.1 kHz, which just about all lossy files follow too.

 
CD quality is CD quality. It does not matter whether it's coming out of a fancy dancy hifi rig or a $20 mp3 player. Period. The work of converting the file to audible sound is done by the DAC and amplifier. It is a discrete set of 1s and 0s, so unless you think the file itself is somehow different coming off a file in a DAP versus off a CD (which is literally just another medium holding a digital audio file) I'm not sure what to tell you. CDs aren't like vinyl, the audio isn't etched into the surface itself, it's basically a flash drive that needs an optical reader.
 
Expensive DAPs are what they are because they have really burly internal amplifiers and DACs as well as the parts to play higher fidelity files, but if you're outboarding the work to an external amp/DAC like the Mojo it doesn't matter if you're using the most expensive player on the market or something you got in a cereal box because literally ALL of the work in converting that digital file into an audio signal is being done externally and you've converted the player itself to nothing more than a storage device.