all of those different DAC techniques have various advantages and disadvantages. As I understand it, the ones that are most prized by audiophiles are the ones that make the CD sound its smoothest and most natural, with the least amount of high-frequency noise, or the least amount of jitter, or the least amount of harshness.

Yep, you're right... But it's important to keep in mind that higher quality components can often go a lot farther for improving sound quality than many of these "tricks" can. For example, the initial reason people started using the "1-bit D/A" solution was cost: it was cheaper to design a decent sounding 1-bit D/A than an equally decent 16-bit D/A. And yet, when we get up to audiophile quality, the 1-bit D/A solution may very well have other limits (like clock jitter, for example) that remove it from consideration. (Don't tell these guys that, though; check out their "Millenium" digital amp.)

Regardless, in the end high-end CD players and external D/A converters do indeed sound better than a $200 Fry's special, on average; and that's largely due to the higher-quality D/A and analog stages.

So when we're playing back our MP3s or WAVs on our PC sound cards or our car MP3 players, are these devices using those same, audiophile-pleasing techniques to turn the data into sound?

Sure they are. The rule is the same for sound cards as it is for CD players: cheap sound cards sound like crap, and you may have to spend some $$$ to get excellent sound quality. Sound cards might have some additional issues to deal with, too, because of interference caused by the surrounding electronics.

I'd say that the average PC sound card is not audiophile quality. The Soundblaster Live is generally well-regarded. Here's a rather extensive analysis of the audio quality of various PC sound cards.

As for the Empeg, well, I don't think I'm quite sure what components they're using. Perhaps one of the empeg boys can address that.






Michael Grant
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