11 Aug
2010
11 Aug
'10
8:18 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Bob van der Poel <bob(a)mellowood.ca> wrote:
I finally got my s/pdif output on my motherboard
working and find the
audio audibly cleaner than previous attempts with various analogue
solutions. My desktop speakers have a digital input, so any noise,
etc. would be the fault of that, not the computer. ??
What I'm wondering: Is digital out via the MB about as good as it
gets? I'm thinking that I could get an expensive <insert name of card>
pci card ... but why? Any signal (digital or analogue), no matter how
clean, it puts out can't be better can it than the digital straight
out of the MB?
digital is digital, so the actual data being delivered by S/PDIF or
ADAT or MADI or any other digital protocol/format will be identical.
but the key to the sound is the digital->analog conversion step and
then any degradation/noise/distortion that occurs in the analog domain
after that.
so, s/pdif gives you a pure path out of the machine, as pure as
anything else, but you could use better converters and/or a better
analog signal path and still see a difference. that is partly what
some (not all) of the out-of-the-box solutions offer.
--p