Please help - My devialet D-premier sounds crap

[ogs]

@newlash09 What you describe does not make sense. I am not saying that you are not hearing differences, but swapping in a D-Premier in place of your amp/dac or your friend's Ayon/Parasound should sound 'different', not 'crap'. Different cables will give 'smaller' relative changes, not transform sound from 'crap' to 'good'. Forget cables and Dirac to begin with. Get the D-Premier to sound decent first, then you can start tweaking. You say your friend has tweaked his system for years.. remember that inserting a new main component in such a system often breaks synergy.

A few things you need to check:
Which firmware is the D-Premier running?
You have the analog input correctly configured as 'line' not 'phono'?
Are you sure there is no input clipping involved? Digital or analog?
And - this may seem obvious, but still - are the tone controls of the D-Premier disabled (0dB)?

Is there an ethernet port on the D-Premier?

In that case, I'd install the Roon trial, copy a few albums to a new folder and make this the Roon music folder (to avoid having Roon analyse your complete collection). Then try Roon's AIR to the D-Premier. This test will bypass most of your current setup. This may also work if the D-Premier only has WiFi, but the best would be ethernet.
If you can not make this sound good I suggest you bring the D-Premier over to your friend with a Devialet amp to compare.


EDIT: remember that the line input of the Devialet amps is AD converted to a digital signal.