Hi Friends,

What factors constitue the sound quality of a CD/DVD player? The transport/optical system or the DAC? Also, if the reciever is good; does it make an ordianary CD/DVD player sound good if connected through coaxial/optical output of the player hence bypassing the players DAC's and using the reciever's high quality DAC's. What will be the difference between analogue stereo outputs and digital outputs in this particular setup? Any insight would be much appreciated.

Sincerely

Mechanon

Hi Friends,

What factors constitue the sound quality of a CD/DVD player? The transport/optical system or the DAC?

Also, if the reciever is good; does it make an ordianary CD/DVD player sound good if connected through coaxial/optical output of the player hence bypassing the players DAC's and using the reciever's high quality DAC's.

What will be the difference between analogue stereo outputs and digital outputs in this particular setup?



Short answer: They all do. The good news is that some of the developments for video display have really solved some of the transport (jitter) issues with CD playback and explains why a lot of DVD players do a pretty good job (providing the DAC and analog output buffer are up to scratch).

Long Answer:
The historical view with bad sounding digital is that the problems lie

in the transport
in the converter(DAC)
in the analog output buffer/filter(DAC)





The reality is that the SPDIF digital interface is ill-conceived as you need to recover clock from the data leading to sensitivity from

impedance mismatch at co-axial out (digital cable)
impedance mismatch at DAC input (digital cable)
noise in the form of jitter from the SPDIF receiver(DAC)






Toshiba has really got its act together in recovering a low jitter data stream from the drive (transport) and then utilizes the same clock (no clock recovery, no SPDIF receiver, no digital cable) and combines this with a decent DAC with differential output and a state of the art output buffer with no coupling caps to muck up the sound. I think most people will be better ahead buying a sd-3990 ( gnu.295.ca/~peak/audio/transport.html#3990 )

P.S. I'm not saying that you cannot get improvements by going external...it just might be more complicated than a carefully co-ordinated vertically oriented attack by a mult-national who does not need to deal with the external SPDIF issues by going internal

Thanks.