Chris was Right! New DAC & Extremely Disappointed

[davidR]

I got a Rosetta 200 today to use with my 003 firewire interface for recording and listening. I haven't bought a pre-amp yet so I hooked the Rosetta straight into my speakers and used Amarra's volume control. Well being completely hasty and not thinking about turning off my speakers before messing around I powered off the Rosetta to change a cable, this resulted in an extremely loud thump which blew my left monitor's tweeter about 2 minutes after getting into listening to my new equipment. Chris has said it before. Use a volume control or a pre-amp for the safety of your speakers folks! The worst part is I know better and am always very careful with my electronics. Now instead of enjoying my new DAC I get to wait for weeks to get my tweeter replaced. Grumble...

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

What a bummer :~(

 

Thanks for sharing. Hopefully others will heed your advice.

 

[PeterSt]

Wow David, I can imagine your mood. I am very sorry for you.

 

But it is true, and can't be said enough ... never go into something new without a preamp or other means of volume control. This counts for hardware, but just the same for software. But it also counts for each sample rate and bit depth you play for the first time from a (new version of a) new player. Even the combinations matter (from 44.1 to 96 is different than the other way around).

 

For a developer it is a rather tough job to cover for this all by decent means, and it can even be related to hardware (so, the combination). I'm sure most of us encountered static, but 99,99% will have had that with an analogue volume control somewhere. It still may give you some additional heartbeats, but without analogue volume, it will take you 5 or 10 seconds to be able to grab the mouse and point it to the right button, even while you were waiting for it with the pointer above that button. You just don't want to know what an explosion of sound that can be with your amps at full gain.

 

Of course this is not what happened to David, but it applies all the more because you may not be thinking about it much at trying a new player etc.

And remember, digital attenuation doesn't help a bit. It must be analogue !

 

Peter