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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: DAC Recommendations

Post Subject: The road to exquisite playback is fraught with IEDsPosted by rowuk on: 7/7/2013

I think that picking a DAC is like picking speakers - regardless of the price, we don't know what we have until we get there. I do not think that it is possible to compare digital and analog playback forms. With a turntable we have as many choices (good and bad) as with multi channel horn speakers - the arm is resonant, the belt drive is resonant, the cartridge is resonant, there are serious changes in quality based on ambient teperature and humidity,, With tape we have a "fragile" playback system with bleedthrough, wow and flutter, head phase anomalies and noise. With digital we have ultimate speed stability and a more or less reproduceable playback that in fact cannot cover up the warts. This places some major requirements on the quality of the original recordings.
Perhaps some interesting facts: Prior to digital, many top microphones had serious resonances between 20khz-30khz. They caused real HAVOC with the first digital recordings - no one was expecting so much energy that could get aliased back to the passband. Tape head gap was a brick wall filter that prevented this stuff from getting into the reproduction chain. With radio we have a 19khz pilot tone filter. So except for direct to disc or digital to vinyl recordings, all analog sources pretty much have no source information above 20khz.
I have had very, very good sonic results with Focusrite ADC/DAC Saffire Pro Firewire adapters. They just seem to get the analog stages right. Much more so than many others that I have tried (M-Audio, Behringer, Apogee, Wadia, Musical Fidelity, Acqvox).
What does the Focusrite do? Well, it is a long story. What I notice is that I listen to the whole track instead of zapping to the next spectacular passage. I think the company name applies Focus-Rite. The image is clear, in focus but not to soft or too etched. Depth/width presentation is wonderful. No facet really sticks out. They have decent headphone amplifiers built in so much of my listening (AKG 701 headphones with compressed ear pads) does not even need any further hardware.
Playback with computer hardware is a journey in itself and like with speakers there is much desinformation on the web. If you are lucky, there may be other people in your general area with advanced taste in music reproduction. There is nothing like an afternoon/weekend comparing two pieces of equipment with another set of ears that you trust!

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