File-Based Audio Done Right at John's

[John]

Aghh so perhaps the DAC had a influence on what Martin and me heard Its a shame we did not have another DAC to test this against

[MartinT]

The DAC always has an influence, John. Mind you, judging by the best sounds we achieved yours is a very fine one indeed.

I couldn't bring the Bushmaster as you need a USB input.

[John]

Yes its a really good DAC I probably get the Ciunas when it comes out.

[Clive]

Yes its a really good DAC I probably get the Ciunas when it comes out.

That's Ciúnas.....I discovered it's easy type ú u + "alt gr".

I too want to compare the new JK dac to the JKDAC32 and a coupe of other DACs have have here for review.

[Canetoad]

ooo... Whilst I know I'll probably not get around to buying a Bushmaster until his superdooper one is made in a couple of years, but that's a shame. Wonder why, receiver chip?

From contact with Stan the BM checks for sample rates etc in firmware. He gave me a circuit mod to change that to using hardware (chip). I'm not sure I want to make the change.

176.4 is one of the sample rate options when extracting wav/flac from DSD files, usually from sacds. I just use 88.2 to save the hassle. Bit rate is 24.

[NRG]

I've had a play with Audacity, I need to listen a lot more and in my main system rather than headphones and with more variety of material. I've converted a standard WAV track to AIFF and also up-sampled it to 88.2/16bit. I can't tell the difference between the AIFF and the WAV, files sizes are identical, so I've put that to one side for now and compared the 88.2/16 WAV vs 44.1/16

There is a difference its difficult to detect on my headphone setup but its there...slightly more presence and smoother in presentation I would tentatively say. Comparing the spectrogram of the two files clearly shows some differences and interestingly information, very low level, up at 23Khz, way beyond my hearing threshold! Also midband and lower down some notable differences. There's stronger amplitude and more lower level information shown, this may account for the impression of greater presence / body to the sound.

Now, the interesting question is what does the resample algorithm in Audacity do? The information cant be 'real' as the original file is a bandwidth limited redbook standard file. Certainly the information past the Nyquist point has to be false and the extra detailing calculated from the original data also 'false'...so at the moment I dont know what to make of it. The differences seem subtle at the moment so I need more time to evaluate...interesting!

[Gazjam]

A bunch of us had a play with the JK Dacs at a get together at mine..
not sure tbh.

[NRG]

Edit, OK I need to upgrade Audacity to 2.0.3 as it now uses the SoX resample libraries

[Ali Tait]

A bunch of us had a play with the JK Dacs at a get together at mine..
not sure tbh.

Aye, neither was as good as the valve dac.

[John]

Hi Gary
I remember Nick DAC won from your report. I can only compare it against the DACs I heard and it did very well using Jplay
What USB DAC would you recommend Nick DAC a bit out of my price range The Ciúnas is rated better still