Is an external DAC for the PC worth it if you have a good Sound Card? - Page 3

But with them you actually have to listen for the differences.

True, but for many, it's just not enough. It's too limiting of a set of system components to be able to aspire to and then to play with upon acquisition. IMO, the material trappings of the hobby are as important or nearly as important as the enjoyment of music itself for many self-described audiophiles.

As the saying goes, "boys like their toys". This hobby is heavily tilted towards the male end of the spectrum. Is this because men are bigger music fans than women, on average? Of course not. It's the tinkering around with equipment and the auditioning of equipment that is a significant draw for many of the men which dominate the hobby. So then to inform them that so much of the equipment they desire to acquire would be an exercise in futility, very likely to yield little to no extra audible benefit (when volume differences and biases are carefully controlled, of course), understandably, they protest. And they have plenty of allies within the industry who are there to supply them with objecting justifications which allow them to continue to deny what they really don't want to believe anyway.
Edited by CruelInventions - 11/11/12 at 12:02pm

Am I ever glad I read this string. I was about to be sucked into buying a very expensive DAC. I'm currently running an Auzentech Explode card direct to optical in on my Denon 3805 with on board Auudyssey. It sounds friggin great! It has the same Burr Brown DACs as many of these expensive eternal models, costs less and provides power for a full HT setup. Go figure!

You DAC pushers can just go stick your DAC up my CRACK!! :-0 <==3

I updated to Windows 8 from XP. I'm not sure how they messed with the transport of the signal, but I feel it sounds better with Windows 8. I know that's only my personal assessment and not scientific. Man, us guys can be real suckers with our tech.

This argument reminded me of the lamp cord vs the $2k speaker wire test done at the CE Convention a few years back. All the self proclaimed audiophiles couldn't tell the difference. Must have really pissed them off! :-).

Thanks guys! Money saved! I think I'll take my wife on a cruise instead of wasting my hard earned money on something I really don't need!

These 3 truisms come to mind after reading this thread
1)•A fool has no desire for wisdom, and would reject it even if he could acquire it because he hates it
2)'A fool and his money are soon parted'
3)There's a sucker born every minute

Haha, same discussion happens about everything, even power cords.
The best reason for buying any of this stuff is simply because you want it.

Is that what the poll shows?

While there will be some small technical differences, I believe that the question at hand is whether the difference will be audible in a well-done listening test. (not the totally casual BS that we see all the time on audio forums).

I bet the way you do listening tests, that will indeed be the case.

Thinking otherwise is often the consequence of very rudimentary listening evaluations. Often they are so rudimentary as to not actually be tests at all.

The world is full ot people who live in the past. I can remember when a 16 bit DAC cost over $100,000.

Today, sonically transparent DACs can be found as accessories on System-On-Chip devices that end up in reasonably-priced digital music players.

Prove it. Show me some well-done listening tests demonstrating what you seem to be claiming.

Is that something that was intended to be taken personally?

LOL!

Interesting thread! My own experiences (subjective as it is) bears out what others are saying. The DACs from the 80s when CD first came out ran the gamut from lousy to very good - not so today. Generic DACs are a dime a dozen and are also very good. Changing a digital signal to an analog signal isn't rocket science. Saying you can hear the difference between the big dollar DAC and the no-name DACs doesn't make it so. Here is one of my favorite 'listening tests'. Note the old cheap gear placed up against the much more expensive gear. The 'winner'? The buying public if they take heed.

I have an Emotiva ERC-2 which is supposed to be very good. And it is. But I can't tell the difference between it and my Oppo BDP-80 which isn't supposed to be very good at CDs - at least according to the audio snobs! I'm buying an external DAC (used XDA-1 $150) only because I need something for switching digital sources and channel that to my USP-1. I have multi-channel but only use it for movies - and I'm seriously thinking of giving up on multi-channel altogether and going all 2 channel.

Today's DACs are pretty damned good be they internal or external. I see some very small DACs going for ridiculous prices. Would they be embarrassed to show what is under the hood for that price (whatever happened to Doug Windsor?) You can buy a decent AVR for what they are asking!

It may not be rocket science but is not walk in the park either. Doing it well requires mixed signal (digital and analog) expertise. Alas since our audio devices have so much digital functionality in them, a digital designer often puts his hand on the analog section. The result is that you get audio, but perhaps not the cleanest audio. Here is a slide from an Audio Engineering Society (AES) presentation that I post in the parallel thread. Everything other than the central bar is distortion (a perfect device would only show that one bar):



Compare that to this design:



Clearly the second designer knows something the first does not. What he knows is outlined in design engineering articles such as this one in EDN: http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4368761/Audio-converter-subsystem-design-challenges-in-the-21st-century. The article is less than a year old.

I have managed design of such hardware in past lives. I can tell that the worst mistake I made was putting a digital designer in charge of designing such circuits. What looks right on paper rarely is.
Your favorite? How many such reports have you seen? I assume hardly any or this one poor write up wouldn't get posted all the time .
The DAC silicon is good. The DAC once designed inside a box is an unknown. Its performance can easily be degraded by a factor or 10 or 100. Or even worse. Without the proper measurements you don't know if it is good or not.
Looks like the new software no longer censors DW's name! No worries though. Good number of people have replaced him here.....

But is this jitter audible in DBTs?

I wonder that myself, noticing that the worst spike on the worst graph is still 80 db down.

You know what amirm says? He says, "I am going to punt that question.", meaning that he is going to dodge that question. Why would someone who sells expensive audio components do that if it's audible? It would be a great marketing point if it is. The reason why he dodges that question is because it's not audible.

Yes.

My best reason for buying any of this stuff is simply because I need it. That makes you a liar.

Nobody needs any of this stuff. You buy it cuz you want it.

Wow, so you to declare me a liar ???
Ok I declare your name to be Richard Head.

Yes and no. I didn't want to buy a HDMI cable because it's additional cost but I did because I needed it for a particular AV setup. The point is, which chashint doesn't get, is that he is making a generalized assumption out of his gut feeling.

I'd bet a ton that it isn't. There are some practical rules about audio artifacts.

(1) If the artifact is 100 dB or more down, forget about it. No way is it audible.

(2) If the artifact is 80 dB down it would take some very special circumstances for it to be audible. Almost certainly won't happen during a listening test unless you stack the deck to create the special circumstances.

(3) If the artifact is 60 dB down it might be audible under some circumstances

(4) If the artifact is 40 or less dB down then you are probably going to notice it. Bad stuff. But under some circumstances it still might be inaudible.

(5) If the artifact is 20 dB down it is almost certainly going to audible much of the time.

Amir's post appears to be trying to get people to obsess over artifacts that are about 90 dB down.

Given the day, I'll be charitable and attribute that to a lack of practical experience with well-done listening tests. ;-)

We should all be thankful that our ears are pretty much dead when it comes to hearing artifacts that are more than 80 dB down. That corresponds to <0.1% THD. It has made audio generally pretty easy and doable for the past 20 years except for speakers and rooms.

All things are possible but realistically, we should talk about things that might happen in the real world.

It doesn't take exotic test equipment to measure audible distortion, no matter what some may say.

Furthermore, DAC chip vendors provide what they call "Reference designs" which are composed of schematics, bill of materials, circuit card land pattern designs and even working examples of both the DAC chip and also the analog circuitry that it takes to get the signal to the analog output terminals in a way that fully exploits what the chip can do.

You don't have to be a master engineer or highly experienced technician to take those kinds of references into production with good results. It has been done 100s of times. I''ve personally done technical tests on over 100 DACs and a fair proportion of them were encapsulated in what was obviously a reference design. They worked great!

There's an obvious strategy in the high end audio industry. If you want to sell vastly overpriced hardware make it appear that things that are actually reasonably easy to do can't be done right without 100s of highly experienced gurus working in a special lab in Vahalla. Set performance standards orders of magnitudes higher than what it actually takes to get the job done well. Use outdated technical tests and articles as your primary references, because back then it was harder to do things right.

On following reference designs, that is what I have had to literally fire hardware engineers over that worked in my group! This is what I meant by digital engineers designing analog circuits. They take the cookbook circuit and PCB layout from the chip company and run with them, not understanding important nuances that they did not know to follow or followed for the wrong reason (just moving a trace may make a big difference in the achieved performance in analog designs). The result was products than then failed to meet the same specifications as the chip company provided in their testing and in our case, failed customer qualification tests requiring expensive redesigns. When I confront such engineers with these major problems, their answer is that: they followed the reference design so it is the chip/sample design that is at fault. So I bring the app (application) engineer who put those reference designs together and the first thing out of their mouth is that these are examples and you have to know what you are doing and not follow them blindly. They are put together for people who are not worried about the best performance and lack the competence to design such circuits. Providing such designs enlargers the market for their chip and provide practical documentation on some of the design aspects. They are not provided as a guaranteed way to get good performance.

For great performance, you have to understand what you are doing rather than following someone else's instructions. A DAC that sits inside a noisy AVR with a ton of other circuits around it is not what the DAC chip app engineer is giving you. That is a more complicated problem that is yours to solve. You can use their reference as a guide but you better know more than that app engineer to build excellence. You can look at the example measurements I gave you for this situation. Notice how the DAC had tons more distortion when driven by HDMI vs S/PDIF in that AVR. The DAC is a constant there. The upstream circuits are not, nor where they part of any reference design from the DAC company. When HDMI is running, a ton of additional circuits start to "whale" because HDMI requires video to work. We can see then so much more distortion is induced in the DAC clock circuit that was not there in S/PDIF version. The second designer clearly knew how to deal with this building a clock circuit that was almost completely insensitive to this factor. BTW, the same measurement exist for other AVRs with much higher distortion in their HDMI vs S/PDIF.

I had a discussion with a company in this forum that kept quoting the specs for the DAC chip as opposed to their processor (multi thousand dollar unit). After much pushing, they provide the measurements. This is what (TI) the chip company provided for the DAC chip:



This what the company measured for that processor with that chip in it:



The peak distortion spikes are at -90 db now vs -110 (as I indicated by the red line in the first graph). So we lost 20 db of performance. And this is from a company that said they hired the best DAC designers and provide this unit to professionals (it is used as a digital cinema audio processor).

Reference designs are most useful for digital systems where such variations do not exist. A DAC and associated clock recovery circuits is not one. Again I say this in the context of getting excellent performance. If the standard is that it spits out audio and degrades the performance of DAC chip by 10 to 30 db, sure, go right ahead. That is not how I aspire to buy equipment that way or managed hardware projects that do the same.

As I said, it is not rocket science but you have to know what they are doing. Read the EDN article I post and it goes over all the things you need to know which sadly, typical engineers don't. This day and age, the name of the game for hardware designers is digital. Good analog designers are much harder to find and fewer still are going to hang around in mass market audio companies working on designs that have to be as cheap as possible to serve a money-losing or barely breaking even industry. Open up a $300 AVR and you tell me how anyone can remotely make money putting so much electronics in there, assemble, test and ship that to you. The two things that matter more than anything else there is how many logos are on the box and how cheaply you managed to produce it!

Fortunately digital systems even when poorly implemented have very good performance. And as listeners, we are not that sensitive to non-linear distortions or else, compressed music would have never taken off. So mistakes and all, you still get sound that has full frequency response and enough dynamics (linear aspects we easily perceive). It is therefore not surprising that people tend to think these factors don't exist. There are many instances where I don't care either. For a system in a living room I don't care either. I put an AVR there and call it the day. Just don't say this stuff is easy and/or you can follow cookbook reference design and we will be friends .

What kind of performance, audible one?
If something produces very good performance, why would you call that "poorly implemented"? What kind of factors, audible ones? None answer from you (aka "punt that question") will mean that they are not audible ones.

oh, I'm sure he gets it. He tossed off a pithy comment with a ring of truth regarding many purchasing situations. I'm confident he didn't mean it to be taken as an absolute truth for every purchase.

Awesome thread. Just saved me a potential fortune. Many thanks gentleman.

It's funny. When someone says they can hear differences between gear... someone asks for measurements that shows the difference otherwise they won't believe you.

Then when someone shows measurements that shows differences between gear... then someone asks if you can hear the difference otherwise they won't believe you.

Why did you quote me for such reply?

It's really pretty simple. Cut to the chase, do a good clean DBT showing the presence of an audible difference, and we will all salute you.

I might even consider dropping number 2. Speakers and room are everything in audio.

I'm new to the hi-fi field. I'm actually an academic in English literature. I have some training in rhetoric and some in logic, although not a lot. Reading hi-fi magazine reviews is mostly an exercise in fishiness, which is why it is so pleasant to read the hard-headed, although sometimes unnecessarily hostile, criticisms in this thread.
Anyway, I've discovered on old magazine called "The Audio Critic"--edited and mostly written by Peter Aczel. I find him not only extremely persuasive and logical, he is also a very good writer and is pleasant to read. His articles like "The Ten Biggest Lies in Audio" (https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.theaudiocritic.com/back_issues/The_Audio_Critic_26_r.pdf) are a delight, IMHO. He seems to have good engineering chops and is an excellent music critic as well.
The magazine is apparently defunct, and I am literally reading reviews from 2000! He lambasts some DACs, but he also praises at least one DAC + preamp (in an online review in 2009 http://www.theaudiocritic.com/plog/) as excellent--actually, as perfect, one that costs about 2K (Benchmark DAC1 HDR ). Of course this is a combination of two items, but the author doesn't denigrate the notion that a DAC should be advertised so prominently in such a high-ticket item.
In a much earlier post, Mr. Krueger says a $25 sound card is as good as the best DAC. My questions are: Have Dac standards improved a lot over the last few years, so that this is true now but wasn't then? Or do you think that Mr. Aczel was really just juding the preamp? Or, was he also...misled?
Thanks.
Edited by Mookalafalas - 3/19/13 at 7:22pm

Yes, the price performance of DACs have improved greatly in the past 13 years. I was mentioning to my wife the other day that it is possible that the DACs in a miniature USB DAC that I picked up for $6.95 in a computer store might duplicate the performance of the DACs in a computer audio interface that I purchased for $350 in 1996. I know for sure that the DACs in my $29.95 digital player (Sansa Fuze) perform in that range and it also has music storage, CPU and display that the little USB DAC lacks.

However, the Benchmark DAC that Mr. Aczel mentioned is an example of a technical tool whose overkill performance makes some sense for certain applications in scientific research and product development. For example, when I was doing listening tests to determine exactly what quality levels are required for sonic transparency, at times I needed a reference tool whose performance was orders of magnitude better than where I estimated audibility to be at. My estimates were close and my equipment was far better than the results I obtained for audibility. Thus my findings about audibility were not contaminated or limited by the built-in limitations of the equipment that I used.

The fallacy is that all of the above are just technical tests. They are all just numbers.

One of the insider mysteries of audio back in the day was how badly signals get mangled from a measurements viewpoint when put through analog tape record/playback or worse yet when recorded and played back from the LP. The music still sounded pretty good. The mystery deepened when people started reporting even more vexing sonic problems with amplifiers and digital audio systems that had far better performance when they evolved in the 1980s. Eventually we unraveled the mystery to a useful degree when we learned how to do reliable and consistent listening tests. The mystery was further explained when the science of psychoacoustics starting producing reams of evidence about issues like masking in the human ear.

The point is that ugly pictures are not necessarily reliable evidence of bad sound or even audibly degraded sound.

My response to the evidence presented above is:

"It's really pretty simple. Cut to the chase, do a good clean DBT showing the presence of an audible difference, and we will all salute you."