Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners DAC: computer Soundcard vs CD Player?

Njooooo! Not the Njoe Tjoeb 4000 again!

Thank you for that link. Is there a link to a standard mass market player and the Musical Fidelity 3.2?

Stereophile is not a peer reviewed journal publication. That data is not acceptable as proof of anything until it passes such rigorous reviews.

That begin said, i think Saturn pretty much nailed it, although the end conclusion is off. You may be able to measure a difference in some esoteric statistic, but no, the human ear is NOT that accurate and the human ego leads one to thinking they are.
Your research should now follow the route of medical science. Start looking up the limits of human hearing such as the minimum time required for the ear to distinguish two separate notes.
Detecting jitter in picoseconds?
You're dreaming.

Try looking up some of the old posts where all these ideas were already hashed through by sushi and Semi.

DJ

I'd ordered the Revolution 5.1 yesterday, it has the AKM AK4358 DAC chip, supposedly better than the 7.1's, it has higher SN/DR, lower THD, and require less CPU to run this sucker. I was doing some research on the AK4358 and came across another kicka$$ card, have you ever heard of the ESI Juli@??

check this out:
http://www.ixbt.com/multimedia/esi/julia/esi-juli@-lynx-two-2496-4dbu-balanced.shtml

This puppy is laying the smack down on the Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro too, and rival the $400 EMU1820, and get this...the ADC is rated at 24/192 with 114dB DR!!! it's even being compare to the $1000+ LynxTwo and hold up pretty well against it:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/esi-julia/

The card is going for only $139, I'll look around and see if there's any better deal, I might get the Juli and do some A/B test with the Revo 5.1.

By the way, folks at head-fi, AVS, and other HTPC forums are all over the EMU 0404 and 1212M, SQ of the DAC from soundcard like these are being compare to sub $1000 CDP, do some search on head-fi or AVS and you'll be shocked, there's a whole new ball game out there...

I recognize that as English... Demi, are you really excited, or is this a form of ebonics I've never heard before?

Bren R.

probably the later, aheh

Hmm - very interesting. I would definitely go for it if I didn't play games on my computer. I really like having EAX HD effects in the games that DO support it, not to mention having the lowest cpu utilization while effects are being processed.

I don't play games often; I spend about two orders of magnitude more time listening to music with the computer than playing games. This makes me reconsider the whole 'gaming card' approach. Then again, why have a bad-for-games sound card when I have a ATI raddy 9800 Pro as my vid card. I also plan on upgrading to 2 x nV 6800 GT PEG in SLI (scalable link interface - a play on words of scan line interleave from 3dfx days) when the nForce with dual PEG (PCI Express Graphics) slots comes out. I guess I like having the ability to game when I want, and I want nothing to hamper my gaming performance.

Anyways, the Audigy is decent enough for MP3 playback, and when I REALLY listen to music, I just pop the cd into my standalone transport and use the receiver DACs to process everything, and thus I avoid the 44 kHz -> 48 kHz -> 44 kHz conversions.

I don't play any PC games at all and I've been clocking the XP Barton 2500 at around 3600 so I'm not too concern about cpu usage, though the 5.1 is much improved over 7.1 in this regard and aim more toward gamers, it's not as cpu intensive and has a better DAC, and work with Window's proprietary volume control.
My Stereo receiver doesn't has any DAC so the conversion will be depend heavily on the Soundcard. This weekend I'll stop by CompUSA or Microcenter and get the EMU 0404, it sports a Burr Brown PCM1804 ADC, and AKM AK4395 DAC, spec on these chips are very impressive!! this should be a good candidate to compete with the Revo 5.1.

Just received the M-Audio Revo 5.1 today and I am NOT impressed at all!! I didn't hear any difference over my old Soundblaster Live 5.1, it doesn't play as loud as the SB, soundstage and imaging didn't improve any, and the hissing noise at max volume is pretty much identical. If you have the Audigy line or older SB Live 5.1, keep them and do what DJ suggested....use the KX Project drivers and tweak the DSP map!! the KX has much noticeable and audible improvement over the crappy creative drivers. This M-Audio is going straight back to newegg!!