Differences in sound: DAC vs. DAC + Pre-amplifier

[AudioDoctor]

Just my opinion, but it depends greatly on the DAC...

[AudioDoctor]

29 minutes ago, Allan F said:

 

The equivalent can be said of those who extol the virtues of digital with their high-end five figure DACs and music servers.

 

I have often wanted to play a needle drop on my digital system to someone who doesn't know which of the two is playing to see if they can tell the difference...

 

I have some very high quality needle drop recordings, some in DSD, and IMO they sound like the vinyl record is playing.

[AudioDoctor]

1 hour ago, ecwl said:

Forgive me for not having read all 18 pages here. But I did a quick search for some keywords and didn’t see them so I presume (and was surprised) this wasn’t discussed. Although I think @barrows sort of touched on this a little

 

I have always thought that one of the reasons why digital volume can sometimes sound inferior to an analog preamp is because a lot of DACs don’t have great low-level linearity. This is measurable except I only see Hi Fi News and Audio Science Review measure this.

 

Randomly I selected one DAC with good linearity and one with poor linearity from both sites:

https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/topping-d90-balanced-usb-dac-review.10519/

https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/measurements-of-musician-pegasus-r2r-dac.18786/

 

https://www.hifinews.com/content/simaudio-moon-780d-v2-network-attached-dac-lab-report

https://www.hifinews.com/content/ps-audio-stellar-gain-cell-dac-stellar-m700-dacpreampmonoblocks-lab-report

 

So you can imagine as you reduce the digital volume, even if mathematically your digital audio signal is accurately reduced, the DAC simply cannot accurately recreate the low-level analog signals because of the poor linearity. Of course, playing the DAC at full power and then using a good analog preamp to lower the volume level would mask the low-level nonlinearity issue.

 

And of course, there are other reasons why people prefer analog preamps.

 

 

 

I think this gets to why HQPlayer has, in my opinion, a great software volume control. Perfect, or near as mathematically possible, linearity and as the volume control can be done in conjunction with upsampling, no resolution is lost in the process.

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, ecwl said:

While this is somewhat true, but even if you’re to use HQPlayer to send excellently upsampled and noise-shaped DSD512 signals to your DAC, your DAC hardware still has to be able to produce that low level of linearity. A simple thought experiment is that if your DSD DAC has lots and lots of jitter, it doesn’t matter how great the noise-shaping is for the DSD512 signal, the actually analog output would still have poor low-level linearity.

 

Then get a better DAC???