On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 15:08:21 GMT, "Wally" wrote:

Jim Lesurf wrote:

The standard domestic links (coax and optical) are 'one way' systems
with no backwards link. However provided that the transport and DAC
are working reasonably well, I'd say this does not really matter much.

Righto. If it's not a 'neccessary' thing, then that's fine.

Not 'necessary', but it does help an outboard DAC to approach the
quality of a one-box player. generally, much better to buy a better
player than to use an outboard DAC for CD replay.

Something to do with better kit does a better job of showing up
flaws, hence, really good kit sounds crap? ;-)

I'm not stepping into that one... :-)

I'm sure an oscilloscope is a much cheaper approach... ;-)

Actually, he's being coy. 'Better kit' in this case most certainly
does *not* include DACs which can't suppress jitter in the datastream,
but they certainly cost a lot of money, and they do sound bad! :-)

In principle, coax may pick up electronics noise, and might provide an
unintended path for something like an earth loop. In practice, I
can't say I've ever noticed any difference between coax S/PDIF and
optical. They both work fine in my experience. Co-ax has the
advantage of being cheap and easy to make up yourself.

I already have an optical interconnect for punting stuff to a portable
minidisk recorder, so I'd probably give that a go first. The DACs I've seen
for sale all look to have both coax and optical, so it's not like there's a
potential cost saving to be had by going after something without one or
other connection type.

As noted, try Meridian DACs - they sound good and they do a good job
of suppressing jitter. I'm not sure that you'll notice much difference
between the original 203 and the later models, as they always had the
engineering pretty well spot on.
--

Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering