Broken dac

[realysm42]

This isn't a moan (although I'm not happy about my M-dac deciding to not power on, but that's another story).

It's an oddity that I've come accross; since my dac breaking, I've had to borrow a £20 QED mono to stereo cable, to route audio from my Realtek ac97 onboard stereo direct to my amp.

This means, I'm circumventing an M-dac that is linked to my amp by Tellurium black xlrs and I swear I can hear more detail in this cheaper (and thereotically far inferior) setup.

I'm confused, although the music seems to be lacking a hint of overall presence, I'm adamant I can hear top end details that just didn't exist before. Of course the proofs in the pudding and I'll do a test whn the poxy thing is repaired, but right now I'm a little uncomfortable at the thought.

I realise there's less in the audio chain in this temporay setup but it still doesn't make sense to me.

Any thoughts/similar experiences?

[synsei]

I've sort of had a similar experience. Recently my Caiman decided it didn't like my Arcam CD72 CDP anymore so I ran the Arcam straight into the DR5 bypassing the DAC. Why oh why did I not try this before? Everything is so natural and open now with deep, deep bass and such air around instruments I can almost touch them. Strangely when playing file based audio through the Caiman I don't get the horrific distortion that I hear with the CDP/Caiman combo. Incidentally this distortion sounds like a stylus mistracking...

[realysm42]

The odd thing is, when I first put the M-dac in the system, it blew me the f*ck away, so I might be getting worried about nothing as my aural memory isn't great I'm pretty sure.

I'll have to test it when it's back though.

Confused :scratch: :mental:

[realysm42]

Noone else had any similar experiences to this?

On further listening, I'm thinking that perhaps what I've got running right now must be very bright sounding, hence the emphasis on the treble etc,

No word on anything to do with the unit's status either; I'm going to Spain tomorrow for a week so I'll just forget about it for now...

[DSJR]

I think its as much to do with our expectations and purchase bias - I've just bought it and it "has" to be better... been there and done it myself many many times in the past.

Add-on DACs were the scourge of the earth at one time, as having a remote DAC with its own clock etc was rarely as good as a complete machine. These days, the whole jitter thing has been put to bed and it seems that proper power supply arrangements are the current "issues" with add-ons such as this. One advantage with Stans DAC's is the multitude of inputs if you use a computer as source as well as a CD transport, but the M-DAC on its own used for CD may be a totally different thing entirely. I don't like MF as a firm from past experience, despite the good performance of some of their product.

[wee tee cee]

Dave,
Its the Audiolab Dac.
MF M1 sounds great and has never missed a beat.

[realysm42]

I've got it back in the loop and setup properly; I did an A/B comparison and there is none; having it in the chain blows away the cheaper alternative - thank God!

Just goes to show you (or I, certainly) really can't trust aural memory; I went through a couple of tracks to be sure with my brother, was pretty good fun.