18-Feb-2016, 11:30
Having done some comparisons, I find the Phantoms' sound quality noticeably better using Dialog compared to the optical input. I compared using Tidal songs (all lossless, "HIFI" available tracks) optical output from a Mac Mini to my right Phantom, and then the same song played through Tidal in Spark. In each case, I found the Spark/Dialog songs to have better ambience, air and more natural sounding vocals. Others have posted that they also feel Dialog sounds better.
I wonder if any of you have theories as to why, and if Devialet can possibly improve the optical input sound quality in future firmware updates? Is perhaps jitter mostly eliminated by sending the buffered song data to the phantoms, whereas real time D/A conversion through optical suffers jitter errors? Optical is generally known to be very jitter prone - in fact, 7 times worse than coax transmission.
Also, have any of you played with the Audio Midi settings in OS X to compare different output sample rates? My initial thoughts are that upsampling to 192khz sounds better, but I haven't spent much time on this. How important is it for the upsampled rate to be an even multiple of the original 44.1khz information (i.e., 88.2khz, 176.4khz, etc.)?
I wonder if any of you have theories as to why, and if Devialet can possibly improve the optical input sound quality in future firmware updates? Is perhaps jitter mostly eliminated by sending the buffered song data to the phantoms, whereas real time D/A conversion through optical suffers jitter errors? Optical is generally known to be very jitter prone - in fact, 7 times worse than coax transmission.
Also, have any of you played with the Audio Midi settings in OS X to compare different output sample rates? My initial thoughts are that upsampling to 192khz sounds better, but I haven't spent much time on this. How important is it for the upsampled rate to be an even multiple of the original 44.1khz information (i.e., 88.2khz, 176.4khz, etc.)?
