Another EBay DAC or Not

[colin.hepburn]

Hi Martin
It’s surprising what you can off a slow boat these days

Well my first go with this computer audio with a DAC and headphones
Not good sound is flat dead

I found out the sound problems with the usb connected DAC the flat dead sound is down to the software used for playback of ripped CD at 44.1

I was using VIC meda player this was flat and dead sounding with any format MP3 WAV FLAC I then tried Meda Monkey this was no better and added sibilance to the top end
I then ran foobar 2000 this was the worst of all flat dead and hard top end I could not believe how bad this software was

I then got rid of the windows Drivers for the DAC to clamed better drivers and found no change to the sound with the above software
So that left windows meda player that most people seem to right off without a second though is seems

Well now I was not expecting much here ether but to my surprises this is the best sounding player of then all so far just to verify this I went back to the Marantz CD player using the DACs coaxial input for a reality check
Only to find windows media player is very close to the Marantz result

It is not perfect but close playing CD from the computers drive and playing WAV/ FLAC file formats @44.1 all sounded much closer to the Marantz CD 67 So Windows media |Player is the winner by a large margin all listeningwas done with my Sennhizer HD650 and the NAD 352 Amp headphone amp out

Now I just need to try the full 32 bit 96 kHz I need to find a site that lets you demo the different file formats