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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: High Quality Music Server / CD player
Post Subject: Don't necessarily trust your soundcard/interface...Posted by manisandher on: 9/27/2008
... to pass data unchanged.

I've been ripping my CDs (using EAC and a Plextor CD-ROM drive) for about 4 years now. I use Foobar with ASIO (and now with WASAPI also) as the software player, loaded onto a Sony laptop. The soundcard is an RME FF800.

Now this is the important part. This feeds an Esoteric D70 DAC... but the DAC provides the master clock via its BNC wordclock output. I.e. the soundcard is slaved to the DAC.

An interesting thing that I have found is that the soundcard changes the data EVEN WITH EVERYTHING SET TO ZERO in its software mixer.

How do I know this? Simple. I take an HDCD-encoded CD and play it on my Esoteric P70 transport connected directy to my DAC. The HDCD indicator lights up on the DAC. I then feed the transport to the RME soundcard's spdif input and take the RME's spdif output to the DAC. I.e. feed the same digital signal to the DAC via the soundcard. With all settings in the soundcard's mixer set to zero, the HDCD indicator does NOT light up. This is also true for other soundcards I have tried!

Now, I can get the HDCD indicator to light up, but I have to manipulate the soundcard mixer's pan pots and sliders. Therefore, with everything set to zero, the soundcard is changing the data!

I am convinced that the soundcard/interface is the main cause of the inferior performance of HDD vs. CD.

FWIW, I have in the past waxed lyrical about the better performance of HDD. However, I revised my opinion once I started burning black CDs from wav files. Playing these, the transport/DAC performs the best... better than playing the original CDs.

Just my two-pennies' worth.

Mani.

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