In article , Oliver Keating
wrote:
I was flicking through "What HiFi" magazine and I came across something
very odd - a series of reviews on *digital* audio cables, for connecting
a CD player to an amp.

There are comments such as "this cable brings across a crisp sound a cut
above the rest"
[snip]

I would treat such comments in magazines is a being 'somewhat unreliable'.
:-)

Which brings me onto CD players. I always thought that amplifier and
speakers mattered the most, but What HiFi reckons CD players are
important, and worthing spending loads of money on. Now, if you have a
CD player in a half decent Hi-Fi setup then you use a digital
interconnect, so really, all the CD player is having to do is read the
raw data off the CD and feed it to the Amp, and the cleverness of its
own DAC is neither here nor there.

The above apparently assumes you have a DAC inside the amp, and that this
is better than the one in the CD player. I doubt that either assumption is
correct in most cases for stereo audio systems. The situation with the
multichannel amps/receivers for AV may be different, though. These may have
digital inputs to allow the unit to process the digital stream from
something like a DVD player. However these aren't (currently at least) the
norm for serious stereo audio use.

So in a £1,000 CD player are you paying for a great DAC (which you won't
use) or simply some very good error correction in the reading process?

There are some differences between DACs due to the varied ways that they
sometimes deal with the digital stream and convert it to analogue. However
these differences may be modest/small in many cases in my experience once
you get above quite cheap players.

Slainte,

Jim

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