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Kudos to Jan for his excellent post. I'm not sure where Kyle got his explanation but he's been misinformed. We are getting pretty off topic for the 9k forum, but it's all good. As demonstrated moreso in the high end of audio circles (Jan's example of Meridian for instance) we have seen all forms of d/a convertors extract musical sound from the 16 bit 44.1khz 1's and 0's encoded on a CD. Except for DVD audio and SACD all compact discs offer ONLY 16 BITS of resolution regardless of how you decode them. I don't think anyone would call the Micromega Trio (a one bit or bitstream three chassis design which cost about $15,000) to be inferior to a 20 bit Pioneer from Circuit City. By the way, the state of art arguably currently in CD playback is the 5 bit "ring DAC" used by DCS in their Elgar D/A and it'll set you back about the same as the Micromega, but it can upsample to and decode 24 bit 96khz material if you happen to have some recordings.
Circuit execution, the analogue output stage, and power supply make the biggest difference, period to the sound of a CD player. The D/A chip one uses is largely irrelevant and is the same form of marketing BS we saw in the 70's with ever lower Total Harmonic Distortion percentages and wattage ratings. I've heard larger audible differences in the type of speaker cable used in a high resolution system than in D/A chips. Have a look sometime at a couple of the world's best CD players -- Naim CDS2, Mark Levinson 30/31.5 for instance -- and you will see that the majority of the investment is in the power supply.
Bringing this back to the automotive realm, in very high end automotive systems (brax, genesis, soundstream intallations) one may encounter an outboard d/a convertor, which is fed by a data signal from a dedicated transport. But bear in mind the level of resolution we're talking about here is very high and very costly and only for the truly obsessed.
Ok, I'm done rambling now,
Bill,
(aero owner, audiophile, and Toronto Audio Engineering Society member)
posted by 129.100.24...
, Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:42:30
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