Why Does My DACK! Sound Like Smackety Smack? - need suggestions

[LawrenceGould]

I bought a Ack! Dac! - it sounds very good when using my NAD CD player as a source (I would characterize the sound as 'smooth' - no digital fatigue in any way)
BUT, when I use the Ack! with my computer it does not sound good at all - very unbalanced sound - bass way too loud.. not smooth.

My computer has a M-Audio Delta 1010 card. So, with the DAC! and the computer I'm using the Delta 1010 SPDIF out into the Ack! DAC! and then the DAC out to my preamp.

Actually the output of the 1010 (using its own DAC) is pretty decent -hough a bit 2 dimensional....close to, but not quite up to audiophile standards.


Any ideas why the output of my computer is not sounding good at all, and what I could do to improve it. Note that, while I do have much compressed music on my computer, I am comparing non-compressed wave files for the purpose of evaluating the computer DAC connection

In my quest for really good sound out of my computer I thought and outboard DAC would be the best option. Was I wrong?

 

[lan]

I've never found the digital out of the M-Audio cards that great. The cards have cheap clocks which yields more jitter. This is probably one reason why it also sounds two dimensional in analog out. Some soundcards SPDIF outs are not up to spec, so that yields more jitter. The dAck! uses coax and using that on a computer is also noisy.

So what you can do is, get another soundcard, use optical out, then jitter reducer/convertor to go coax into dack or get the dack modded to include an optical in.