Talk about lead with your chin.....<opens popcorn>
Talk about lead with your chin.....<opens popcorn>
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 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.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.
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.Maybe you are just wrong...
Funny that the guy who headed up the design team at ESS that designed the Sabre chip, and now the Invicta DAC disagrees with you- even though he's trying to sell a digital volume controlled product.
http://www.sixmoons.com/audioreviews/resonessence/2.html
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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.
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*.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
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.