joelpearce
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2010
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Most of the media that we listen to music from are now digital. CDs are digital, MP3s are digital, Computer files are digital...
Our ears are analog, though, so any time we listen to music on speakers or headphones, there needs to be a device that converts digital to analog somewhere along the way.
Some DACs are better than others. The ones in sound cards and portable players are notoriously crappy, for a variety of reasons. If what you're doing now is sending an analog signal to your Yamaha receiver, you are letting the sound card's DAC do the work, then are just using the amp to amplify that signal. You've already heard the results of that.
Instead, ideally you should have another device in the chain--one that gets the pure digital signal from your computer and feeds a better analog signal to your amp, or a way to get that digital signal into either the optical or digital coax inputs of your receiver, so that the receiver is doing the DAC work, which will sound much better.
Again, my guess is that if you can get a proper digital signal into that receiver, you should be getting excellent sound--it's virtually identical to the setup I am using right now. I have a sound card with an optical out, connected to my Yamaha receiver.
Our ears are analog, though, so any time we listen to music on speakers or headphones, there needs to be a device that converts digital to analog somewhere along the way.
Some DACs are better than others. The ones in sound cards and portable players are notoriously crappy, for a variety of reasons. If what you're doing now is sending an analog signal to your Yamaha receiver, you are letting the sound card's DAC do the work, then are just using the amp to amplify that signal. You've already heard the results of that.
Instead, ideally you should have another device in the chain--one that gets the pure digital signal from your computer and feeds a better analog signal to your amp, or a way to get that digital signal into either the optical or digital coax inputs of your receiver, so that the receiver is doing the DAC work, which will sound much better.
Again, my guess is that if you can get a proper digital signal into that receiver, you should be getting excellent sound--it's virtually identical to the setup I am using right now. I have a sound card with an optical out, connected to my Yamaha receiver.
