And what Alan described is exactly what i did the past 2 weeks. I set up the dvd or cd players via analog or optical connections and ran 2 identical music test discs in tandem and switched between the vid1 and vid2 on my receiver that the players were hooked into.
The differences were very hard to notice but in playing back a 4 second clip of audio on each player quickly and listening to both, it was possible to pick out a difference. Two of the players were identical and i could not differentiate between them at all but i had no problems discerning the newer models from my old Technics player.
Incidentally, i found a huge difference between the optical and analog connections in that the optical channels when selected, played the music several dB louder than when using the analog channels. This is not saying the quality was necessarily different but for some reason the sensitivity i guess you could say, was different.
Since that point in time we've discussed how the optical connections circumvent the DAC onboard the player and instead the DAC onboard the receiver is the primarily digital to anaolog decompiler. Hence my perceived difference is most likely due to the fact i was either listening to the player or i was listening to my receivers' version of the encoding/decoding process.
I do believe you can hear differences between DACs however they are still VERY minute as Alan states. In the end, it was the features of the dvd player that won me out more than the sound quality.
My general impression is that most of today's typical consumer DACs are all pretty high quality (24bit/192khz) and very close in quality (ie. all 24bit/94-192khz) but this topic was originated to get some other people's thoughts on using their dvd players for music rather than 'dedicated' cd players. Some diehards believe that this axiom (pardon the pun) holds true and i wanted to test it for myself. So i did.
Geez, you would think i do enough research at work. Why the heck do i keep bringing it home?
ARgghhh.
Last edited by chesseroo; 07/04/02 10:02 PM.
