Complexity of the circuit design, efficiency and size. Is literally just… literal wires to do a circuit and in audiophile equipment you’re only gonna find these on Amps and headamps due to the difficulty
Dacs are basically process specific computers
when dealing with Processors, computer equipment the interconnections between them are A) exceedingly complex and B) incredibly small, to where its almost physically impossible to achieve the results purely by hand without it being the size of a car. In fact the only reason your dac right now isnt the size of a buick is because of printed circuit boards.
The photography analogy is useful. Often in photography people can get caught up with the number of pixels in the resolution but don’t take into account the quality and size of each pixel and the manner in which it captures light and presents colour. Even the most digital heights of photography are still mechanical or analogical in that sense. That’s what many people will prefer a 12 mb full frame over a 36Mp CMOS sensor. The pixels are differently constructed so to speak.
Filters (conditioners) can only do so much, if I get a chance I’ll try and capture what my power looks like on either side of a conditioner, it’s really not that different, they predominantly clean up high frequency noise and don’t address fundamental issues with the power.
Regenerators provide clean sinewaves to the equipment, because they rectify it to DC then regenerate the actual 60Hz signal, so regardless of how bad you power in is you get clean power out.
I use a conditioner, because you can get a decent conditioner for $200, an entry level regenerator is >$2000.
ok. the price kind of settles the decision with which to go with. So really with Regenerators power cables become irrelevant. I guess you can save money in that sense, but what a price…
No if anything they are more important, without a regenerator, your power is basically coming from the local substation, so your power cable is the last 6ft of that circuit.
With a regenerator your powercable is the only 6ft of the circuit.
FWIW the argument by people who don’t like conditioners is that while they generally make things sound initially better, they remove some of the impact, and detail that’s there to do it.
I suspect a lot if if people like/dislike them is down to how good their power is, I’ve put a scope on mine at several times and I can tell you mine was a lot better 6 years ago than it is today, that could be down to the power company changing equipment, or one of the other people on the same substation running something particularly noisy, or it could be the Air conditioner I had added, or the whole house generator wiring etc etc etc.
Dual mono DACs apparently are great, too. Hard to find, though. (Correct me if I’m wrong) dual mono is “full-balanced everything”, using different chipsets and opamps etc. for the left and right channels. Why? For soundstage, and to eliminate possible interferences between the left and right channel, I guess.
Hard to find because it’s hard to do? Or just because it’s not worth it? I don’t know. Still, someone has done this:
ok, thanks for that. I guess that means that the you could make the argument that it might be better for some people, according to what they want out of the sound, it’s better to do without any conditioner at all, and just tolerate whatever noise ends up passing into the system.
Balanced has nothing to do if it uses 2 DAC’s or 1, I guess it might decrease crosstalk.
Balanced is just the use of a differential signal, “full balanced” usually just means differential input to output.
DAC’s using resistor ladders don’t really have a choice about using “Dual Mono”, I’d assume that the Soekris marketing is just specifying that each channel has discrete components.
I just know it’s a thing, I don’t know if it does anything or if it’s just for marketing, lol. It’s just that we were talking about the differences between DS and R2Rs, and these seem to sit in between (although for the price of one of these, you can get a Soekris 1321, for example).
I know the Topping D50S or even the Fiio BTR5 got dual ESS DACs but uh, we won’t talk about these here (not dual mono either I believe – good for what they are… definitely not enough for a “tier list” of endgame DACs).
I never considered that but yup, R2Rs have to have 2x uh, ladders, for the left and right channels.
You might be wondering what I’m doing in this thread when my main DAC is an AVR… well, simple enough. The differences between DS dacs is so negligible, I won’t bother. My next one will be something like a Soekris 1321.
Edit: oh, yeah, it will be a matter of months, too. I got other stuff to buy etc. I need to be careful on this forum, some people think I want to buy everything now.
