Ross
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2001
- Posts
- 852
- Likes
- 128
A DAP with no hard drive, no amp and no DAC - just a small box big enough to house a 9v battery, a 1gb flash drive, and a CPU capable of running only one application such as Winamp and a USB input and output. The DAP could then be connected to an external portable hard drive such as a 320GB WD Portable Essentials and an external DAC/amp such as the Meier 2Move.
The advantages of this approach compared to current DAPs/amps is:
The reason I suggest this is that I recently bought a little EEE PC with 12GB of HD, and a separate 320GB portable HD which is powered by the EEE PC. The EEE PC is quite tiny for a notebook, and the portable HD is hardly bigger than an iPod. I had planned to use it as a server for my Squeezeboxes, and also use it as a transportable system with my Meier 2Move.
After setting it up and loading some ALAC files on the HD, and then playing back through the 2Move, I was stunned by how good this sounded through ER4Ss, SE530s and Senn 650s. Now, I have a whole collection of DAPs - ipod classic, Zune 80GB, Zen Vision M, Kenwood Mediakeg, Sony 829, iRiver H340 - and this system kicks the crap out of all of them. And it kicks them from one end of the field and back again without effort.
This has led me to the conclusion that DAPs, while functional, do not sound that great. Recently I created a little controversy in a thread in which I observed that my old Sony Walkman Pro cassette portable sounded better than any of my DAPs. Some people took this to mean that I was suggested that analog, and worse still cassette was better than digital. This was not the case -it was the implementation that I was preferring. The Sony Walkman Pro cassette deck contains some serious playback technology, carries a fair bit of power and has some serious amplification. While there were still the inherent limitations of the cassette technology - wow and flutter etc - the sound was still rich, full bodied and dynamic, compared to the anemic, bland sound coming out of every one of my DAPs. But I do not wish to re-open that debate. The problem is not the format, but the reproduction technology.
The little portable amp/dac combinations are now sounding extremely good. I was frankly blown away by how good the 2Move sounded used as the external sound card/amp from my EEE PC (and also as just an amp). It sounds far better than the output of any DAP. So what we need is either a DAP that provides a USB output or a device that connects the amp/dac to a portable HD including some useful playback software. It should be very cheap to manufacture and sell such a device - surely no more expensive than the cheapest current 1GB DAP. The other components already exist. And finally we would have audiophile quality sound from a DAP.
The advantages of this approach compared to current DAPs/amps is:
- it would be cheap
- you could replace the dac/amp as better ones became available
- you could replace the hard drive with bigger or smaller ones as they became available
- you could run multiple hard drives with different types of music or different compression (eg a 320GB HD for FLAC, ALAC or WAV and a 120GB for MP3)
- you could use the playback software of your choice
- you could using a filing system or library management system of your choice
- redundancy - if any part failed, you could just replace it without having to replace the whole thing
- and most importantly, it would sound much, much better than any DAP or DAP/amp currently available.
The reason I suggest this is that I recently bought a little EEE PC with 12GB of HD, and a separate 320GB portable HD which is powered by the EEE PC. The EEE PC is quite tiny for a notebook, and the portable HD is hardly bigger than an iPod. I had planned to use it as a server for my Squeezeboxes, and also use it as a transportable system with my Meier 2Move.
After setting it up and loading some ALAC files on the HD, and then playing back through the 2Move, I was stunned by how good this sounded through ER4Ss, SE530s and Senn 650s. Now, I have a whole collection of DAPs - ipod classic, Zune 80GB, Zen Vision M, Kenwood Mediakeg, Sony 829, iRiver H340 - and this system kicks the crap out of all of them. And it kicks them from one end of the field and back again without effort.
This has led me to the conclusion that DAPs, while functional, do not sound that great. Recently I created a little controversy in a thread in which I observed that my old Sony Walkman Pro cassette portable sounded better than any of my DAPs. Some people took this to mean that I was suggested that analog, and worse still cassette was better than digital. This was not the case -it was the implementation that I was preferring. The Sony Walkman Pro cassette deck contains some serious playback technology, carries a fair bit of power and has some serious amplification. While there were still the inherent limitations of the cassette technology - wow and flutter etc - the sound was still rich, full bodied and dynamic, compared to the anemic, bland sound coming out of every one of my DAPs. But I do not wish to re-open that debate. The problem is not the format, but the reproduction technology.
The little portable amp/dac combinations are now sounding extremely good. I was frankly blown away by how good the 2Move sounded used as the external sound card/amp from my EEE PC (and also as just an amp). It sounds far better than the output of any DAP. So what we need is either a DAP that provides a USB output or a device that connects the amp/dac to a portable HD including some useful playback software. It should be very cheap to manufacture and sell such a device - surely no more expensive than the cheapest current 1GB DAP. The other components already exist. And finally we would have audiophile quality sound from a DAP.
