dac's?

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Bjorn Zetterlund

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 3, 2004
Messages
123
Location
London, UK
Hi everyone!

My first post in the new home...

My monitoring set up is a Dell computer with a Soundblaster card, an Amcron DC300A, and NS-10M's. At this point it is strictly my home/for-fun setup and I don't do any audio work on it as such. All of my gear is currently in various states of build/rebuild, to hopefully be ready when my band decides we are ready to make another album.

Still, given that this is basically my hi-fi setup, I would like to make things sound as good as possible. I love the NS10's and certainly do not want to change them...they are my reality as far as any engineering is concerned. I am hoping to upgrade the soundcard, though, and I was wondering what the opinions might be here at the lab. An apogee would be lovely, but even their cheapest is well out of my range at the moment. There are a few different 'hi-fi' soundcards available from studiospares in the UK for about £100. Is there such a thing as a good sounding card when it actually sits in your computer? My first instinct is to say it lives inside a hostile environment and also has only a presumably fairly dirty 5V supply to work with, and therefore inherently will be fairly limited, regardless of the devices the card actually contains.

Another option would be prototype cards...that can easily be made into working boxes with a suitable psu. One choice is converters from wolfson; prototype cards are available from www.profusionplc.com

A complete DIY is another option, but I really feel that's beyond me. I also don't wish to be bogged down with another project; I am really hoping for something reasonably cheap but good. Any thoughts would be welcome on this...I am sure I am not the only one who has been in this position, thanks all!

Bjorn
 
The internal soundcards have more jitter because the PSU, a external soundcard or external converters are better for jittering.
There are very different opinions in AD/DAs too, RME have a very good reputation. I`m using a Creamware pulsar/Luna2 combo and using external converters thru ADAT pipe. I have a swissonic for A/D and Behringer for D/A, the behringers are very good to my ears when they are master clock or wordclock synced, worse when they are synced to ADAT.
I think you must get quality for AD/DA, if the original signal sucks, you`ll compress, eq and process a bad sound anyway...

Best Regards,

Synthi.
 

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