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rega dac, cdq, young dac bake off

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Apologies if this has already been covered in this thread.

Has anyone run the Emotiva DAC directly into their amplifier? Did lower volume settings on the Emotiva affect sound quality due to decreased resolution?

Thanks
 
Hi Wilson

To maintain some kind of uniformity, we ran everything through the pre-amp.

If I have any regret, I wish I had my power amps that I have now, then. They may have revealed a little more between the DACs.. but you can never have it all.

Item Audio will doubltess be able to tell you more on your question if you send them a message.

All the best
 
(Practically) all attenuation is lossy, but I've come to believe that digital VC is better value than analog: it's not hard to design a reasonably good, cheap digital attenuation stage, but it's tough to attenuate well analog-ishly* on a budget. Good analog volume controls are horribly expensive.

So the Emotiva does a very credible job for £350. You would need a very good dedicated preamp to better its transparency.

* Perversely 'analog' has no word equivalent to 'digitally'
 
bottleneck said:
To maintain some kind of uniformity, we ran everything through the pre-amp.
Click to expand...

This was the only stone we left unturned: it's a very big real-world advantage (not to mention super thrifty) if a DAC has a volume control.

If we'd have put the preamp in the way of those DACs that need it, I think we might have seen a different pecking order . . .

bottleneck said:
If I have any regret, I wish I had my power amps that I have now, then. They may have revealed a little more between the DACs...
Click to expand...

Ooh! What are you listening to now, then? Valves still?
 
Well, no hifi company has yet been able to design a digital volume control with greater real world precision than the best analogue potentiometers, they always trail by a handful of db noise, even when implemented in 32bit.

Point in case the new digital attenuation in the DAC from the team who designed the Sabre chip, is 4db more noisy than an analogue equivalent would be- by their own measurement.
 
Of course the main problem with digital volume control is when you have multiple sources. If I had one source only (ever) may have (personally) taken this factor into greater account.

Item - have gone to solid state.
 
Yeh I seem to remember someone not so far from this thread providing irrefutable proof of the impossibility of some of Dan Lavry's previous product claims.
 
Point in case the new digital attenuation in the DAC from the team who designed the Sabre chip, is 4db more noisy than an analogue equivalent would be- by their own measurement.
Click to expand...
But this 'noise' should be way below the overall noise floor of the system. It's not relevant in the real world. Whereas the tracking errors introduced by analogue attenuators definitely are.

Paul
 
sq225917 said:
Maybe you are just wrong...
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Or maybe not. What Paul R implied was that in the real world the noise content of recordings is so much worse than these numbers that, in practice, the apparently poorer noise performance of digital attenuators is a matter of purely theoretical concern.
 
Plutox said:
Or maybe not. What Paul R implied was that in the real world the noise content of recordings is so much worse than these numbers that, in practice, the apparently poorer noise performance of digital attenuators is a matter of purely theoretical concern.
Click to expand...


Not quite sure I understand you. Additional noise from the attenuation process is additional noise, regardless of the signal to noise ratio of the recorded track. If you add more noise you add more noise regardless of what was already captured on the recording.

Are you really attempting to say that poorer SNR is ok on poorly recorded tracks with higher background noise? You are funny. No doubt a hifi manufacturer will be along soon attempting to sell us shit low-fidelity under the ' you only listen to mp3 what do you fu_king care how shit it sounds banner'.
 
sq225917 said:
Additional noise from the attenuation process is additional noise, regardless of the signal to noise ratio of the recorded track. If you add more noise you add more noise regardless of what was already captured on the recording
Click to expand...
Absolutely true. It's just a matter of magnitudes however. If your source material has a noise level of, say,-70dB and you pass it through a device with a noise level of, say, -120dB, the resultant noise level will become worse: it will be about -69.98dB. The louder noise source dominates and the greater the difference, the more true this becomes*.

The very best recorded material we can produce will have a noise floor several orders of magnitude worse than a well-designed digital volume control can achieve. In short, in the real world, it is of no consequence.

*remember that the dB is a relative logarithmic unit. -6dB halves the voltage. -12dB is 25%. In the above example, the noise voltage of the volume control is about point three of one percent of that of the recording being controlled.
 
sq225917 said:
Well, no hifi company has yet been able to design a digital volume control with greater real world precision than the best analogue potentiometers, they always trail by a handful of db noise, even when implemented in 32bit.
Click to expand...

The best analog potentiometers are disproportionately expensive.
Cheap digital volume controls sound disproportionately good.
Digital attenuation is excellent value.

If we switch suddenly to a discussion of the ultimate volume control, well, good luck with that . . .
 
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