@jackyan
IN THEORY (I put that in capitals because practice does not always agree with theory) feeding a digital signal from your Lumin to your Devialet should sound no worse than and possibly better than having your Lumin convert the signal to analog, feeding that to the Devialet and having the Devialet convert the signal back to digital, passing that through the Devialet's internal DAC and then converting it back to analog. By passing a digital signal to the Devialet you avoid a digital to analog conversion in the Lumin and an analog to digital conversion in the Devialet. In both cases the end result is going to be the output from the Devialet's DAC.
IN PRACTICE, what could contribute to the result sounding better if you feed the Devialet an analog signal from the Lumin than a digital one? I can think of 2 things. The first is the digital input you used on the 440 Pro. People on this forum commonly report having different preferences for which digital input they use.
I can think of one other possibility. When your Lumin converts the digital signal to analog, is it doing any upsampling or other digital processing and was the digital output you fed to your 440 Pro given the same processing? Was, for example, the signal upsampled to 192/24 before being converted to analog in the Lumin and sent as a 44.1/16 digital signal from the Lumia to the 440 Pro? If the digital to analog conversion in the Lumin involved upsampling to a different resolution than the resolution of the digital signal you sent to the 440 Pro, then try comparing the 2 signal streams when the same signal signal processing is applied in each case and see if that makes a difference to your preference.
I can remember years ago when I still had a disc player in my system, having my SACD player connected to my 140 Pro via both analog connection and digital. If I was playing a CD I used the digital connection. If I was playing an SACD I used the analog connection because the player could not output the DSD data stream and analog was the only output I could get from the player. I compared the digital output from the CD layer of several 2 layer SACDs with no upsampling to the analog output from the CD layer and also to the analog output from the SACD layer. They all sounded slightly different but they all also sounded good. I could happily listen to any of them if I didn't have a choice but I did have a choice and I preferred the sound from the SACD layer which was analog to the digital output from the CD layer and I preferred both of those to the analog output from the CD layer.
There's a lot more going on with digital signals than many people believe. Different devices handle the digital signal differently, there are different ADC and DAC approaches, some devices use upsampling and others don't. What kind of digital connection you use can make a difference and you've got a number of options on the 440 Pro. There's a lot going on "under the hood" and what processing gets applied along the way, where it's applied, and how the device doing the processing does it can all make a difference.
You didn't say what processing was applied in the Lumin in relation to either the digital output or the analog output and you didn't say which digital input you used on the Devialet. There's a lot of options in all of those factors. If you only tried one option for the analog route and one for the digital route then you certainly haven't explored all of your options and while the analog path you used sounded better to you than the digital path, that may not be the case if you compare a different digital path or even change something in the analog path.
Digital offers us a lot of options and they aren't all equal. You probably haven't tried all of your options yet and, if you do try them all, you may still come to the same conclusion but you also may not. It's up to you just how far the rabbit hole you want to go when it comes to playing with digital audio.
IN THEORY (I put that in capitals because practice does not always agree with theory) feeding a digital signal from your Lumin to your Devialet should sound no worse than and possibly better than having your Lumin convert the signal to analog, feeding that to the Devialet and having the Devialet convert the signal back to digital, passing that through the Devialet's internal DAC and then converting it back to analog. By passing a digital signal to the Devialet you avoid a digital to analog conversion in the Lumin and an analog to digital conversion in the Devialet. In both cases the end result is going to be the output from the Devialet's DAC.
IN PRACTICE, what could contribute to the result sounding better if you feed the Devialet an analog signal from the Lumin than a digital one? I can think of 2 things. The first is the digital input you used on the 440 Pro. People on this forum commonly report having different preferences for which digital input they use.
I can think of one other possibility. When your Lumin converts the digital signal to analog, is it doing any upsampling or other digital processing and was the digital output you fed to your 440 Pro given the same processing? Was, for example, the signal upsampled to 192/24 before being converted to analog in the Lumin and sent as a 44.1/16 digital signal from the Lumia to the 440 Pro? If the digital to analog conversion in the Lumin involved upsampling to a different resolution than the resolution of the digital signal you sent to the 440 Pro, then try comparing the 2 signal streams when the same signal signal processing is applied in each case and see if that makes a difference to your preference.
I can remember years ago when I still had a disc player in my system, having my SACD player connected to my 140 Pro via both analog connection and digital. If I was playing a CD I used the digital connection. If I was playing an SACD I used the analog connection because the player could not output the DSD data stream and analog was the only output I could get from the player. I compared the digital output from the CD layer of several 2 layer SACDs with no upsampling to the analog output from the CD layer and also to the analog output from the SACD layer. They all sounded slightly different but they all also sounded good. I could happily listen to any of them if I didn't have a choice but I did have a choice and I preferred the sound from the SACD layer which was analog to the digital output from the CD layer and I preferred both of those to the analog output from the CD layer.
There's a lot more going on with digital signals than many people believe. Different devices handle the digital signal differently, there are different ADC and DAC approaches, some devices use upsampling and others don't. What kind of digital connection you use can make a difference and you've got a number of options on the 440 Pro. There's a lot going on "under the hood" and what processing gets applied along the way, where it's applied, and how the device doing the processing does it can all make a difference.
You didn't say what processing was applied in the Lumin in relation to either the digital output or the analog output and you didn't say which digital input you used on the Devialet. There's a lot of options in all of those factors. If you only tried one option for the analog route and one for the digital route then you certainly haven't explored all of your options and while the analog path you used sounded better to you than the digital path, that may not be the case if you compare a different digital path or even change something in the analog path.
Digital offers us a lot of options and they aren't all equal. You probably haven't tried all of your options yet and, if you do try them all, you may still come to the same conclusion but you also may not. It's up to you just how far the rabbit hole you want to go when it comes to playing with digital audio.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
