Adding a DAC to RCD-1072

[hired goon]

G'day,

Has anyone connected a DAC to a Rotel RCD-1072, and noticed a difference?

I've been looking at the Musical Fidelity X-DAC v3 in particular for a HTPC project. I'm wondering if connecting this to a sound card may be superior to my RCD-1072, or whether it would even improve the sound of my RCD-1072.

Also, if anyone has tried the Musical Fidelity X-10 v3 Tube Output Buffer on Rotel gear, I'd love to hear how it sounded.

--Geoff

[mattburk]

they actually have that exact set up at my local hifi store. I have not listened to it, but being that they sell that exact set up, I bet its a good option.

[hired goon]

G'day,

I'm looking at the Benchmark DAC1 as well, which gets discussed a fair bit around here. If I used my DVD player as transport to this DAC, would it give better sound than my Rotel RCD-1072?

--Geoff

[Jeff]

hired goon, in my case the 1072 was better. What I did to test this is to hook up my digital output on both myToshiba 5700 dvd player ($400) and the 1072. That way I was using the DAC's in the receiver to test which transport was better. With this test the 1072 was an easy winner. What surprised me was that it was pretty easy to determine the improvement. I was expecting little to no difference.

Jeff

[hired goon]

G'day,

...That way I was using the DAC's in the receiver to test which transport was better. With this test the 1072 was an easy winner.

I wonder if this is because the transports introduce different kinds of errors (or varying degrees of the same error), and the DAC in the receiver was only good enough to fix the errors from the better transport?

What I mean is, perhaps a better DAC (such as the Benchmark DAC1) would have corrected more errors from either transport, rather than just those in the better transport?

Dunno if that's possible, but just a thought.

--Geoff

[chrispy35]

G'day,
I wonder if this is because the transports introduce different kinds of errors (or varying degrees of the same error), and the DAC in the receiver was only good enough to fix the errors from the better transport?
--Geoff

I'm pretty sure there are no data (amplitude) errors to worry about. i.e. A '1' never gets interpreted as a '0' and vice versa, for either transport. The 1992 AES paper "Is the AESEBU/SPDIF Digital Audio Interface Flawed?" covers this.

The only type of error would be a timing error: jitter. It's quite possible that the two different players have very different output jitter levels and that the DAC used is not good a filtering out the jitter.