On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 10:06:58 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote:

In article , Oliver Keating
wrote:

[snip]

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.

This raises an interesting point; a while ago, I was planning on building
a modest home cinema/hi-fi rig and my plan was to treat it much the same
as I treat building computers; good quality central components
(motherboard, PSU, DAC/Amplifier) and Human IO devices (monitor, keyboard,
mouse, speakers) and spend what I can afford on the rest (CPU, memory,
video card, CD transports). The logic behind that is that I
don't want to spend large amounts of money on components that rapidly
become obsolete, but instead spend it on components that will be the last
to be upgraded and for which good quality/stability is necessary.

When I explained this to the guy behind the counter in Richer Sounds he
seemed a bit surprised but intrigued by my strategy. What does the
collective wisdom of u.r.a think?

[snip]

Jim

Best Regards,
Alex.
--
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