Ok,

I have a DVD player which was one of the cheapest ones around when I bought
it (mid 2001 - it's a Yelo DVD800).

If I buy a 2nd-hand DAC, is that going to give me a good sound, as opposed
to buying a CD player for the same money as the DAC? I'm talking low budget
here?

Cheers,

J

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:35:59 +0000 (UTC)
Jay wrote:

If I buy a 2nd-hand DAC, is that going to give me a good sound, as opposed
to buying a CD player for the same money as the DAC? I'm talking low budget
here?

Probably makes very little difference - a CD player mechanism is dirt cheap these days (like, sub 5UKP probably). All the rest of the money is divided between markup and the digital-analogue electronics.

The question is what do you want it for?

If you just want a better CD source, give your cheapie to someone who hasnt got one or something, and buy a new CD player.

If you want to get nice digital sound from a PC or have multiple digital sources, buy a DAC.

Be warned though that only a very few companies produce good DACs (ie. that outperform the ones in CD players).

My ARCAM Delta Black Box 3 sounds good to me, although I suspect the high end modern DACs in expensive CD players beat it.

Meridian appears to be 'the' name in DACs currently, and their design (to all intents and purposes) eliminates jitter (which the cheaper DACs dont generally do so well. Their output filtering is apparently good as well.

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

Ian Molton wrote in
:

Probably makes very little difference - a CD player mechanism is dirt
cheap these days (like, sub 5UKP probably). All the rest of the money
is divided between markup and the digital-analogue electronics.

The question is what do you want it for?

If you just want a better CD source, give your cheapie to someone who
hasnt got one or something, and buy a new CD player.

If you want to get nice digital sound from a PC or have multiple
digital sources, buy a DAC.

Be warned though that only a very few companies produce good DACs (ie.
that outperform the ones in CD players).

My ARCAM Delta Black Box 3 sounds good to me, although I suspect the
high end modern DACs in expensive CD players beat it.

Meridian appears to be 'the' name in DACs currently, and their design
(to all intents and purposes) eliminates jitter (which the cheaper
DACs dont generally do so well. Their output filtering is apparently
good as well.


Ah, I see.

Well, I'm going to keep my DVD player, and was wondering if I could get
an old DAC for £100 - £200 whether it would ourperform a CD player for
the same money.

either way, I'll keep the DVD player.

But you reckon that it would be just as good getting a CD player?

cool. I'll look into it.

j

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:58:44 +0000 (UTC)
Jay wrote:

Ah, I see.

Well, I'm going to keep my DVD player, and was wondering if I could get
an old DAC for _100 - _200 whether it would ourperform a CD player for
the same money.

either way, I'll keep the DVD player.

But you reckon that it would be just as good getting a CD player?

Only if you are going to feed your DVD player into it as well (DVDP tend to have crap DACs). then you'd probably want a DAC with AC3 , surround, and all that.

cool. I'll look into it.

DONT get a cheapie - it WILL sound like a cheapie (by all accounts here so far). either buy a new good one (5-800ukp to START - rediculous priceS) or hunt ebay for a good 2nd hand one.

Im very happy with my ARCAM DBB3 and Meridians 203 is well liked by Jim Lesurf who is a very knowledgeable chap in these matters. the 203 (IIRC) has only coax in though and no fancy decoder, just a DAC (the BB3 is also just a DAC).

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

"Ian Molton" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:58:44 +0000 (UTC)
Jay wrote:


Im very happy with my ARCAM DBB3 and Meridians 203 is well liked by Jim
Lesurf who is a very knowledgeable chap in these matters. the 203 (IIRC)
has only coax in though and no fancy decoder, just a DAC (the BB3 is also
just a DAC).


The 203 has both optical and coax input and the manual recommends optical.
Superb dac with a cheap source.

Alan

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 20:22:11 +0000 (UTC)
"Alan Murphy" wrote:

The 203 has both optical and coax input and the manual recommends optical.
Superb dac with a cheap source.

optical too? darn, I musta misremembered. sorry about that.

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 16:58:44 +0000 (UTC), Jay wrote:

Ian Molton wrote in
:

Probably makes very little difference - a CD player mechanism is dirt
cheap these days (like, sub 5UKP probably). All the rest of the money
is divided between markup and the digital-analogue electronics.

The question is what do you want it for?

If you just want a better CD source, give your cheapie to someone who
hasnt got one or something, and buy a new CD player.

If you want to get nice digital sound from a PC or have multiple
digital sources, buy a DAC.

Be warned though that only a very few companies produce good DACs (ie.
that outperform the ones in CD players).

My ARCAM Delta Black Box 3 sounds good to me, although I suspect the
high end modern DACs in expensive CD players beat it.

Meridian appears to be 'the' name in DACs currently, and their design
(to all intents and purposes) eliminates jitter (which the cheaper
DACs dont generally do so well. Their output filtering is apparently
good as well.


Ah, I see.

Well, I'm going to keep my DVD player, and was wondering if I could get
an old DAC for £100 - £200 whether it would ourperform a CD player for
the same money.

either way, I'll keep the DVD player.

But you reckon that it would be just as good getting a CD player?

cool. I'll look into it.

j

If keeping the DVD player then I would recomend you spend as much
money as you can afford on a decent CD player. This will far
outperform all but the VERY expensive DVD players on CD replay.

I'd go with a decent second hand ARCAM CD player off eBay.

As for taking your DVD player into an external DAC for DD or DTS, its
going to make no difference in quality. Both formats are compressed
and error corrected so to lose quality, you'd have to have a VERY bad
transport. What's more important here is the transport of the DVD
player, not the DAC at the other end.

Ray.

On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 13:26:36 +0000
Nutter wrote:

As for taking your DVD player into an external DAC for DD or DTS, its
going to make no difference in quality.

'scuse me? WHAT? Have you completely lost the plot?

are you suggesting that a 35ukp DVDP is going to sound the same as you'd get if you piped the data into a high-end AV amp ?

the question isnt really about the quality of the source or connection (as established elsewhere) within reasonable limits. The whole point of using an external D-A conversion (and/or codec) is to allow one to spend money where it really counts - on the best quality converter available, as opposed to using the 20 pence codec chip that comes built into the source.

What's more important here is the transport of the DVD
player, not the DAC at the other end.

balls.

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

the question isnt really about the quality of the source or
connection (as established elsewhere) within reasonable limits. The
whole point of using an external D-A conversion (and/or codec) is to
allow one to spend money where it really counts - on the best quality
converter available, as opposed to using the 20 pence codec chip that
comes built into the source.

odd that, you'll find the same 20 pence codec in a far east DVD player as
you likely will in an outboard processor.

Differences will be mostly in the analogue stages, PSU, amplifier, filter
etc. Likelihood of finding a cheap philips or crystal part as the DAC is
quite high. YMMV (I've never taken one apart) but it's not the DAC that
costs money, it's things like transformers, caps and low noise transistors.

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004 14:03:23 +0000, Ian Molton wrote:

On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 13:26:36 +0000
Nutter wrote:

As for taking your DVD player into an external DAC for DD or DTS, its
going to make no difference in quality.

'scuse me? WHAT? Have you completely lost the plot?

Let me clarify my point here. The use of an external DAC in this case
is unlikely to improve sound quality if using the same amp at the
other end. If we are talking a 5 channel integrated home cinema AMP,
then 99.99% of the times its going to have DD and\DTS decoding. It
makes no sense to take a DVD player into an external DAC (which must
of course have DD and\DTS decoding as well) and then take 5 pre-outs
into the AMP. The weak link here is the AMP, not the DAC. Of course we
could be talking about a pure pre-amp decoder with seperate power
AMP's, but thats another thing althogther.


are you suggesting that a 35ukp DVDP is going to sound the same as you'd get if you piped the data into a high-end AV amp ?

No, but any DVD players outputing a DD stream into the SAME AMP
digitally will sound the same. Again here its the processing and
quality of the AMP that is important, not the source. As stated
previouisly, the only time this may not be true is when the transport
of the DVD player is so bad, that it fails to retrieve the DD or DTS
bitstream correctly. But I'm guessing if this was the case you would
hear it.



the question isnt really about the quality of the source or connection (as established elsewhere) within reasonable limits. The whole point of using an external D-A conversion (and/or codec) is to allow one to spend money where it really counts - on the best quality converter available, as opposed to using the 20 pence codec chip that comes built into the source.

That's a matter of opinion. Like other discussion along the line of
'you should spend a bigger % of budget on the speakers' vs 'bigger %
money on the source'. My personal opinion is that in the DD\DTS realm,
it is more important to have a decent AMP, than an expensive DAC.

For CD music, then obviously a combination of a decent Transport, DAC
AND AMP is of the utmost importance, which is why in an earlier post I
suggest buying a second hand ARCAM CD player, I don't think many on
here would disagree.

What's more important here is the transport of the DVD
player, not the DAC at the other end.

balls.

Not in this particular case and not for DD and DTS its not. The guy is
not talking about changing his AMP, so its likely that he will want to
continue to use the DD\DTS decoding of his AMP.

Given the DVD player is cheap, I don't think adding an external DAC
will be as wise a buying a dedicated CD player. The one thing that
really set's apart the quality of DVD players is when listening to
their ability to reproduce CD music.

In fact when I auditioned DVD players, the only thing I did was to
listen to CD's through them. Wanting a decent sounding DVD AND CD
player was my goal, guessing (at the time) there would be little to no
perceivable difference in video quality. For the record I setteled on
an ARCAM DV88, which blew away the other players I listened to (Denon
& Pioneer) on CD playback.