On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 12:22:25 -0000, "Wally"
wrote:

Alex Butcher wrote:

...but do you think you could tell the difference between your old
player connected to your DAC via a digital link, and your mate's
Arcam connected to the same DAC via a digital link?

I think detecting a difference in sound quality in this situation would be
next to impossible.


DACs are known to have an impact on sound. I'm not sure what the
state of the art is now, but the various newish and very cheap
CD-Rom/personal CD players (i.e. probably using new 1-bit DACs) that
I have sound *better* than my 13 year old Aiwa midi (which has a
olde-fashioned 16-bit DAC).

I don't really know which conversion system is supposedly better.

Neither. Multibit is prone to low-level non-linearity, single-bit is
prone to jitter. State of the art converters tend to be hybrids like
the dCS RingDAC, high-oversampling 4 or 5 bit designs.

The DAC is
several years old (1990-ish?),

Yup, that's about right. HFN reviewed it in August 1990, I think I
bought mine/yours early in '91.

while the DVD was bought new about a year
ago. It's interesting to note that the DVD player has a quoted noise figure
of 70dB, compared to the DAC's at around 94dB.

70dB?!! That's *atrocious*!
--

Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering