Stephen or someone, I have a snot nosed little puke pissing me off and I need some more info. This person is great at quoting specs and links etc. but so far cannot or will not tell me if he has ever heard a difference. Now I for one can hear a difference and have since day one. One of my sales techniques was to let a customer hear two Denon cd players priced $100 dollars apart. The only difference was single bit to multi bit(24 bit and the more expensive model). By knowing my music I was playing and informing the customer of what to listen for, they too could now hear a difference between single and multi bit d/a. Now specs and links aside, have you ever run across this as well. If not find yourself a couple of cd player, a good amp and a quite room and listen to some tracks from Madonna (older Madonna), The Rankin Family, Celine Dion. What I heard from the multi bit players was much more musical accuracy in the vocals and instruments, the single bit tended to blend together the female vocals of the Rankin Family and the banjo, guitar, violin, piano. When you listened to the same track on the same speakers, same amp, the difference in sound was amazing with the 24 bit Denon. Vocals were clearly distict, instruments played with clarity and precision, gone was the blended mush and nasally sound present with the 1 bit. Anyways guys, give me some feedback, Thanks
I'll take your word for it on that one....not that I disagree or anything... However I've never heard two products that were exactly identical other than one having a 1-bit and the other being a multi-bit.... sorry
from what i understand, i believe there's more to it than that. some of the lower end companies offer multi-bit dac's, and some of the mid-high end offer single bit dac's. that doesnt make the entry level stuff sound better, because the whole quality factor comes in. now i cant prove that, but it is my understanding...i believe my friend who is in circuit design courses at purdue explained that to me. eric
I wish I could help you there, but I have always put more emphasis on other things when buying equipment than the DAC's. I bought the best, and know that I have the best. I just checked and my head unit has "4 Staggered 20-Bit-Bur Brown® D/As", which I believe my processor does as well. I've read in reviews that those are some of the best you can buy, and didn't research any further. Whether it made an audible difference or not, I don't know. But I know my system is super clean. And I was more buying the equipment for other reasons (like 72 dB per octave digital slopes :ss: ) than the DAC's anyway, so those were just icing on the cake. Also I want to say that I'm not big on doing a test that way. It is too easy to psychologically want to hear a difference in the better one. This can make you hear something that may not be there. I believe much more in blind tests because that eliminates that possibility. I think that issue can be seen in home audio when they use highly expensive ceramic speaker wire stands to keep the wire off the floor. I don't doubt that those people actually heard a difference after doing it. But I do doubt that there was an audible difference in their system.
Maybe I wasn't too clear with the post... It was the Pepsi vs. Coke test. We had a nice quite room, 1 Harman Kardon receiver, 1 pr Nuance 4.4 speakers, 1 Denon 1 bit cd player ($299.99), 1 Denon 24bit cd player ($399.99). We would use the same audio track for all customers. We eliminated all variables so that it was only the cd players we could compare with. Now most of you have favorite tracks to demo with, you know that it sounds great or will play to this volume level or show you what 40hz feels like. We did the same, by knowing our source material, you could audibly hear the differences in the two cd players. What we did was to help the customer make an informed and educated buying decision, the customer was in the store to buy a cd player, we just allowed them to make a choice based on what they heard. Most customers bought the more expensive cd player after hearing the differences, the others, well they still bought, so all customers were happy. If you have a chance, do this for yourself, you will hear a difference, use that Rankin Family cd I used, it may not be what you like to listen to, but it will sure tear a speaker down in hurry.
I am not filmiar with those players, but inrealtiy the only way to eliminate all other varibales to to remove the DAC's from one unit and replace it with the other Things like Crossover Slopes, Cossovers Types, even Brands can "color" the sounds just because you "set" them the same does not mean they are processing the same
as nismo and stephen touched on...there are diff DAC's i do believe that a DAC built at the same level (same quality, type of parts, etc) will be superior in one way or another if it is multi-bit vs a single bit... however, it wouldn't be a fair comparison to compare a crappy multi-bit to a nice single-bit in this example the equipment is the same....and you'd tend to believe that the differences wouldn't be too huge in processing outside of the DAC
