We're you the one calling to order it during the video ?😂

Way to go Charles, I have the Gain Cell, and the M700's as well, than this past Christmas I added the BHK preamp, be careful Charles ,because once you have been bit by the audio bug , there is no turning back,

@@stevebailey31 I've been warned-Thanks!

Awesome. Let us know how you like them!

Awesome, good choice.

The SPDIF a disc player will not pass DSD, the DSD is converted to PCM first.. analog or HDMI is the only way to pass SACD signals.

The phone premap uses the RIAA equalization curve. Digital needss converters in the time domane. There is a huge diffrenmce.

Hello mine frfends! PLese google 'time domain audio compression' ans follwo the links! WHat university did you get you electrical engineering degree from. Did you take the couse on digital logics or do you prefer op amps for an analog computers. THANKES YOUES! YOUYARE MINE NEWS FREMDS BTS i AM NOTa drunks I am diableds since 1960. thankes youes!

If you are using the onboard DAC built into the player, your output will be either analog voltage over RCA or analog voltage over XLR depending on your gear. If you are using an external DAC, that's the only time you would use a digital output, either S/PDIF over RCA cables or optical Toslink connections, both of which run digitally. The "issue" with S/PDIF is that the bit clock, word clock, and data stream are all mixed and encoded into a single stream for transmission over a single wire or optical connection. Decoding and reconstructing the mixture can result in degradation of the original components' signal integrity. Using an HDMI cable to deliver these individual signals in parallel without having to encode and mix them together results in maximum delivered signal integrity at the DAC and best possible conversion by the DAC. A poor signal can easily compromise an otherwise excellent DAC, so going HDMI cable for a physical data transport insures you won't experience one.

@@Peter_S_ thank you. Great post.

I thought the same, huh?. Was also confused if you go out to an external DAC, hasn't the sound/data already gone through your internal DAC?

@@knobbshots picture the connections as the sound going out to the external DAC in lieu of going to the internal DAC. In reality if your player has both digital and analog outputs, the sound is coming from the transport as a digital I2S signal and then going to both the DAC chip and S/PDIF encoder chip in parallel after which each signal connects to the rear panel jacks through their individual duffer/driver stages. Both are probably always active and one just lies fallow.

@@Peter_S_ But cd players do not have hdmi output?

THE ORACLE ,, For me over the years, I use the Coax more often as solid wire sounds a little better than light transmission👍 I do use Optical in & out on my Denon AVR 5803 but not on the Blu-ray player.. Even there, Solid Copper coax cable to me makes Audio superior as there’s never any “jitter” whatsoever.. Hope this helps.. Best2you.. On my YT channel, I often have shown the connections & wire I’m using👍

@@meutubedou Thx for the info. So just leave it as it is.

NO!

Thank you for pointing out the misconceptions presented in this video.

sudd Nope, you have to go used for now. They’ve had issues with putting a cheesy transport in their past multi-thousand dollar players, so maybe the next model will be better.

Fat Rat I saw that they bought a bunch of ESOTERIC disc drives from a post in 2018, if I’m reading it right. People have been replacing their faulty transports with ASUS drives. Still why is Paul even mentioning them as something they make when they’re not, right now?

Their transpirt/ drives used to be made by Oppo. When Oppo pulled the plug on their UHD/Blueray players, PS Audio was sadly left without a quality supplier, so they discontinued their cd transport units.

The low-level protocol for data transmission in AES3 and S/PDIF is largely identical. Both are indeed composed of raw PCM data with no data compression.

@@Peter_S_ Hmm. So if it is taking the exact data off of a compact disk and transmitting it to another device without actually altering it barring what the DAC's do how could the sound in fact change?

@@MrRoberacer Excellent question and it comes down to the signal integrity which ultimately determines the jitter at the DAC chip and the stability of the clock which has all kinds of propeller-head implications. The DAC chip gets its data as an I2S interface which has a data stream, bit clock, and word clock. These are mixed to transmit over single optical fibers or RCA cables and at the receiving end the three signals are reconstructed. The data stream and word clock are relatively trivial to send across but the bit clock is a very high precision signal and best not mixed with anything else. The mixed signals are variable enough that the bit clock needs to be reconstructed at the receiver by a local precision oscillator (sometimes only precision-ish) which is influenced by the received bit clock information. The receiver's oscillator will always have some amount of mismatch and some receiver designs will continuously adjust to track the data from the transport but not all devices deal with these mismatches with grace and jitter is awful stuff for digital audio. There are also other asynchronous designs that work via stretching or dropping bits strategically which do a better job but which receiver chips use which techniques, I couldn't tell you. By using an HDMI cable to send the data in parallel without mixing it, the bit clock from the transport can be simply used the way it is in a regular CD's internal DAC without having to reconstruct it and now your sound quality matches the best that the transport can provide from its clock.

@@Peter_S_ Hmm. Thank you. That makes much more sense now and illuminates an important issue in other areas of audio.

​@@MrRoberacer You're welcome, Sir. I don't accept the word of the marketing folks until I have a scientific explanation as to why things are. Some of these topics are simply too complex to express in a marketing blurb so for the purpose of sales, we are presented with simplified views and these often lack the context with which to understand what's genuinely happening. Quite often, the simplified views present something that seems in conflict with what we know from more complex understandings. Added to this is the reality that every chip designer has "solved" these issues to varying degrees and in varying ways so it's impossible to make a great many blanket statements. While some solutions approach perfection, most are "good enough" to meet their specifications and price point. As consumers we have been presented with S/PDIF as an easy way interconnect things but as audiophiles, we're focused on the highest quality achievable and convenience is undesirable should it compromise the sound in even the slightest way. In electronics lab environments, it's quite common to have a seperate master clock (often a rubidium oscillator atomic clock) which is distributed to every piece of gear so that everything is perfectly synchronized by design; it's too bad that digital audio didn't evolve with a similar architecture but using HDMI cables gets us as close to that as we really need to be.

Fat RatL JCM 900 has clipping diode in it. Why did you say Julius Futterman does not need a output transformer. It imdence from complex power. The use capacitor for the power factor and coordination study during a ground fault? IEEE 802.3 is not Ethernet. Please be carefule when you post things. Ethernet is analog signals over copper wire, it is not digital pulses. What university did you flunk out from? thanks you THUMBBSS UPS!

Hello Mister Rats! plese google 'julius futterman no output transformer'. and floow th elkinkes. he made an amp with no poututs transfromers. Thakes youes you are a news frends! THUMS UPS!

My internal wolfson DAC runs perfect. :)

Caveat to the above: If you deliver the individual clocks from the CD player to the DAC without having to go though intermediary encoding and decoding with subsequent clock recovery, you gain the benefit of total synchronization as well as the benefits coming from an audiophile DAC implementation. I placed a digital tap in my Sony CDP-101 player to enable this functionality and make it more of just a transport.

Thorsten Amesöder Internal DACs in CDs are architecturally the right way due to synchronized single clock data flow control and only issue is when the engineers go cheap on the IC.

And you think that when a DAC pulls data from the external drive there isn’t another clock involved than the master DAC clock? Sorry but there is. Everything digital works entirely on clocks and flip flops. And let’s not forget that external drives are noisy. A good CD player with digital out will be far less noisy.

Alain François The best architecture is one where a single clock directly clocking the PCM data in the DAC is what determines the flow of data without any other clock pushing data from the source side. This means a data pull architecture. A CD player can work as clock master pushing data to the DAC if using I2S but the issue then is that the DAC is likely using PDM at a much higher frequency and thus needs a higher frequency to run at anyway causing the need for a separate out of synch clock. Of course you have oscillators in many places throughout a digital audio path involving music but it doesn’t matter for any jitter issue if the system is pulling the data. For example, there is no jitter introduced from the crystal oscillator in your WiFi router when an audio streaming player runs a media session over your WiFi router because it’s entirely based on a pulling data approach. A good DAC will include sufficient smart data buffering and some way of eliminating audible jitter without impacting the DACs own output clock.

Fat Rat I understand that, tho the finding and having access to a dac that is so much better than what you have in your CD player to test in your own set up is hard to do. I’m just speaking from experience.

Fat Rat well said.

Merlin ... not even the Marantz SA10?

What's with the lousy cds still fellas? Can't you old toads wisen up a bit and run your flac files from a flash drive these days?

2 stacks is modest lol

@@hushpuppykl I didn't find the SA10 to exceed the Benchmark DAC

@behexen250 Really, Japan has the most dominant CD,SACD market in the world right now...Marantz, Luxman, even some of the Denon, Sony are pretty hard to beat..

I have a Marantz and its laser is constantly clicking, sounding like a direction indicator light on the dashboard of a car. lol

@Fat Rat Nah I've ordered a new laser assembly for it. Arrives within two weeks and should make the thing dead quiet again for the upcoming 15 years.

@Fat Rat Jup a fresh laser assembly or laser mechanism is the solution most of the time. Lasers slowly rot away/deteriorate, just like cds themselves are subject to discrot.

@Fat Rat Gosh FR it's almost like we know each other IRL but don't put the two and two together here. What quadrant of the planet do you frequent?

@Fat Rat OK, I am pretty much in the direction of your feet in The People's Republik of Kalifornia so I guess we don't know each other. I had forgotten about the PS Audio ad. Funny AF.

You would be surprised to find out the things audiophiles think they can hear...

@@Gabriel-of-KZfaq ^^he gets it^^

Sort of yes, but the box isn't missing very much that you'll find in a typical CD player. The raw digital data from the laser still needs processing to decode the cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coded data stream and perform the error detection and correction functions resulting in a bit clock, a word clock, and a data stream for a DAC. Another way to look at it is that a transport includes everything in a CD player except the all important DAC, analog power supplies, and analog output buffer for that DAC while those parts have been replaced by digital line drivers and in most models encoders for the digital output. In the end the amount of hardware is about the same. Another distinction is that in a device designed to deliver digital information rather than analog, special attention is paid to parameters like clock jitter and they'll put extra care into making sure the digital information is presented in the best possible form to the DAC. Can you have transport with a built-in utility DAC? Certainly, that could be a CD player as well.

@@Peter_S_ So the goal is to take a DAT out of the CD player and replace it with an external DAT. Wouldn't a CD Player Maker put the DAT in the CD player that would work best with said CD player? In example, I really cant see someone making a quality Player and then says let's put that POS DAT in there to F_ it up in the very end. Not saying they would put their best in a average Player but at least as good as the rest of the stuff inside the player. Why waste money of good parts just for a crappy DAT? So if the rest of the stuff is only as good as the internal DAT then what is the point of a better external DAT? As for the "transports" … just sounds like another way of getting more money out of you while giving you less. The audiophile way imho. My CD player is about the only digital I listen to and I would rather listen to local FM radio then stream. Streaming to me is what you hear in the background at a store in a mall. Don't get me wrong, I was doing it by hot wiring my PC to my stereo back in the late 90's early 2000's just to listen to radio stations from where we used to live. Today I have a Fios feed and I'm sure most of you are "pulling down playlists from the cloud" and such like my kids do but I have let most of that just slide by. Just not into it for some reason. Guess I just getting old and there is none of DAT in my future.

​Very good questions, fin screenname. I'll try to make this ramble easier to follow with some hyphens... - As audiophiles, we generally like to achieve the best possible performance of every system component to result in the best sound. - The transport/DAC interface provides a perfect point of demarcation between subsystems and the reality is that all parts in a design have a cost. If you engineer a transport which is the best it can be and place all of the investment there without implementing the DAC, you have a best possible component for use in a larger overall system. - The DAC subsystem is composed of the DAC chip itself, the output buffer to drive the cable going to the amp, and a low noise analog power supply so it's not inconsequential by any means and it has a very real cost. Not including those pieces means that you still have to spend budget on the parts to transport the digital information, but a very good digital data transport costs less than an audiophile DAC chip and related support parts so you can instead invest more budget in the transport design and its decoder logic. - That allows for potentially providing better error response from a more complex and expensive decoder, as well as better mechanical parts used in the transport but on top of that, - separating the digital intensive processing and electrically noisy motor environment of the transport from the dead quiet analog world of the DAC chip and isolating them in different chassis with totally different power supplies allows the DAC to perform better with lower noise and who doesn't appreciate lower noise? Chips appreciate it too. - Once the data has been read, error corrected, decoded, and readied for the DAC, it becomes the universal I2S data format and this format is the same regardless of whether you're using using a cheap consumer DAC chip from a company like Wolfson, an audiophile level DAC chip form a company like ESS, or you're going all out and using an FPGA as PS Audio does in their highest end offerings. There's probably an order of magnitude cost differential between implementing each of those three. So.... - It's not that a company would use a "crappy" DAC, but rather that they would choose a DAC which is "good enough" to address the needs of their customers and for the price point of the player. "Good" comes from a number of perspectives and the transport has all kinds of mechanical aspects that the DAC does not. If you include the best possible everything, your products will cost $$$$$$ and you won't be in business long. As audiophiles we generally know that there are better potentials available than giant makers deliver so we have the benefit of comparatively smaller companies like PS Audio who will address these functions as separate sub-components and offer the ones they do in a best possible implementation. - Also consider that while the transport can be "perfect enough", the DAC is open to new territory and its performance can be upgraded as new techniques become available. - Again, not paying for an audiophile DAC in a transport doesn't mean you're getting any less for your money. Quite on the contrary it usually means that you're getting better engineering and components in what you are getting. It also means you get products from makers who are able to apply their unique talents to each subsystem. Integrateds are almost always a compromise, and sometimes they're multiple compromises. - The audiophile world encompasses a wide range of players, some of whom play to excess but at the same time there are good and decent players with some exceptionally high quality offerings delivering excellent price/performance ratios. From all that I've seen in the industry I'm very impressed with every aspect of the PS Audio gear I've looked at and listened to. - On streaming... You can't make such a blanket statement. If you stream CD quality data, you'll result in the same stream you get from a CD. I can certainly understand being dissatisfied with your computer's DAC and finding it useful only for background music. I don't go after anybody's playlist unless I find it by looking for something specific which it includes and I don't use any streaming service beyond KZfaq, radio.garden for broadcast radio, and individual college stations via their websites. KZfaq is an amazing resource for finding new things but once I've found them I like to have the CD for my own listening if its available. Much of the time its not.

More complex answer: It depends on what topology you prefer based on clock synchronization. The DAC synchronized with the CD transport where the DAC works as master is often considered best.