GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

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

Post Subject: Search of the best DACPosted by Stitch on: 7/7/2013

... is quite a long journey. In the last 15 years we got every month a new, sonic revolution in sonic digital Playback. We got up sampling, HDCD ... SACD, separate units, digital cables, separate master clocks, output stage with tubes and so on and on and on.Based on that marketing I would say, digital playback is now 25x better than live. Minimum.

I had DCS units, CEC units, master clocks .... and listened to endless of those expensive (StahlTek, MSB, Esoteric, new dCS ...) units. In summary I say today: Forget it.
No matter what you do, no matter how much money you spend, when the source (CD) is not done outstanding, you will hear a mediocre reproduction and you won't play that CD anymore. After all those years we get the "information" NOW from our reviewers that the normal Redbook CD is overall the most natural recording :-)
I know a few who go back buying CD's 2. hand made in the 80's, early 90's .... >Y2K it is like rolling a dice, except someone prefers those pure Audiophile Masterings, but when you want a kind of time document, the older ones have something which is hard to find today: Ambience and a illusion of being part of the performance, but most are more or less dead. That is digital, you can't have everything.
Anyway, each his own, but I started looking finally for a one box solution which doesn't make me cry and bought an Emmlabs. It is true from tone (when it is recorded that way), it can reproduce a soundstage properly (when it is done right from mastering) and it is able to separate complicated classic music, not the usual sonic wall of sound where all is equal (I call it the Phil Spector wall of sound).
And I don't listen to SACD's.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site