Understanding DA conversion of Dialog / Phantoms

[ragwo]

It's probably to do with how those sources are processing the digital streams prior to output I take it your udp1 has a digital out that bypasses it own dacs, maybe it's just a great transport. Also you could be falling into the trap of believing it's better just coz it cost 4 grand. If I blind tested you with your sources could you really tell which was which?


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I´m not sure if i would always detect a difference between cables, mp3 - flac, .. But in this case 100%. The sound is so much warmer with the upd1.

Funny thing was: I used Tidal - lossless till recently. One of my favorite cds is Gladiator from Hans Zimmer. Compared to my udp1 the sound was cold and lifeless. Long time i thought the dialog is the reason. So i was looking out for other streamer like Auralic Aries, Linn, ... 

But before buying i ripped the cd to pc and played it again through the dialog. And it sounded great. I was curios now and signed up for qobuz - lossless. I expected the same bad sound like with Tidal. But it sounded exactly like the one played from the pc. I then did a spektrum analysis with the files (different songs from others albums, not only gladiator) from tidal, qobuz,  and cd. The image showed the qobuz and cd are identical, but Tidal has less information.

Tidal sounding less good could be the steaming bug that resets the streaming quality to 320 AAC or even 96 AAC every time you start Spark or it gets kicked out of the internal memory of your phone.