Audible Differences in DAC's?
Reply #19 – 2013-02-04 19:40:12
You can try for yourself, download this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5985984/DAC-test.zip It's a blind test I made with a Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 USB-DAC which costed me around 50 euro. The first test has two files, one is the original, the other is that original after it has been played and recorded (looped back over a short unbalanced cable) 24x. So, any degradation coming from the DAC and ADC in that thing has been added and stacked 24 times. Try to find any differences. I haven't had time to look at the second set, but on test test1-1 vs test 1-2, it was really easy to discern the difference between the two - the noise floor in test1-2 was very different from the one in test1-1. I think it took me about a minute to do ten trials. Test done using ABXer on OSX, with the FLAC files converted to .wav using ffmpeg in order to have playable files. Test log follows:ABX Test Completed: 2013-02-04 19:28:17 +0000 Number of tests performed: 10 Number of correct answers: 10 Percentage correct: 100% File 1 = /Users/arve/Downloads/DAC-test/wav/test1-1.wav File 2 = /Users/arve/Downloads/DAC-test/wav/test1-2.wav File placement was static. n [A] [X] [B] Choice Score 1 [2] [2] [1] A 1/1 2 [2] [2] [1] A 2/2 3 [2] [2] [1] A 3/3 4 [2] [2] [1] A 4/4 5 [2] [1] [1] B 5/5 6 [2] [2] [1] A 6/6 7 [2] [1] [1] B 7/7 8 [2] [2] [1] A 8/8 9 [2] [1] [1] B 9/9 10 [2] [2] [1] A 10/10 --------------------------------------------------------------