Campaign to eliminate separate DAC boxes starts here!

Rob said on another thread:

"I am personally quite anti dac and want to see them fade into obscurity to join the likes of cassette, 8 Track and quadraphonic. I like the converter to be inside the amp or the transport since I believe their preponderance as a 'must have' system component only encourages needless tinkering and focus on trivia."

It seems that DACs are responsible for massive fleecing of the hifi buyer IMHO. The price variation alone is just daft. Surely the continued existence of the separate DAC box is ONLY due to marketing, and not any technical need? I have 2 amps with built in DACs so it must be possible to include them as part of the design?

If someone made a module for the Quad 34 which included a DAC I would buy it like a shot! Any chance guys?

 

Couldn't agree more with Rob's basic premise - it's why I've stuck with a cd player. One box, done.

DACs have become prone to rampant datasheet bodgineering - there's about a billion more on the market than the world needs and very few of them actually advance the art.

But they are all cheerfully hyped and sold on, along with the implicit guilt that next years' will be better but meanwhile obviously sir needs their attendant interconnects, power supplies , mains cables, isolation products...

Cynical? me?

 

Hi I was reading that manufacturers have admitted most of their dacs are 5% parts 95% profit.

This means a popular dac like the audiolab m-dac is only £60 costs £540 profit!!!

I have tried all kinds of dacs and premaps in my time and always find on-board sounds good, i usually upgrade any obvious components, caps, resistors, etc and it sounds just as good as any external dac

 

Well, I am nervous about profit figures - a senior accountant I worked with once told me that profit is more or less what you want it to be. Clearly any product has to recover development costs as well. But I would have thought that DACs are a pretty mature technology by now.

When all the phones in our pockets have a DAC built in which functions pretty well in the most adverse environment - ie surrounded by radios etc - and by now the chips used must be pretty standard - and therefore cheap - what are we paying for?

Another example - Google's chromecast device combines a wireless receiver and all the necessary to receive, decode and playback HD video for less than £40. If the interface was something other than HDMI it would be perfect for audio.

 

You shouldn't read too much into the profit margins since there is a lot more to making a successful and widely available product than the parts cost. Naim could knock out a DAC for low cost, but then they would be an unknown business like the many on eBay selling from China that come and go.

Not that I am defending DACs that cost say £5k a pop.

I do think with DSP stuff becoming more common and usefull in hi-fi that a DAC is a good location to centralise the processing and conversion stage. Putting that in a pre-amp would be fine too, though. Indeed my modded DEQ is a DAC/Pre with DSP.

 

Yes that's quite different - it's a pre, room correction unit, EQ, ADC and DAC.
It combines many functions and can replace the conventional pre amp.

My beef is with the standalone dac, and like Martin the main concern is the sheer number of them on the market all doing basically the same thing yet claiming to be substantially different. Well some are different in that you can voice a product, but most are designed to be transparent and we can find examples from £100 on up to the stratospheric price range which succeed in this goal.

Dacs for Quad pre amps.... hmm yes that's certainly possible.
Pretty easy on a fully modular 44 since you just need to produce a card.
Harder to do with a 34 since space is very limited. You could replace the phono card but that's sacrilege in my book - otherwise it means a small daughter board perhaps routed via one of the line inputs circuit. Be cool to have a new button made..... 'Dig' or PCM
Or integrated Airplay - though that would need very careful consideration given to RFI.

<....goes off to investigate....>

 

Thought that might interest you...

It would be soooo cool to have a completely stock looking quad pre which has a dac inside!

Although it is not too hard to hide a Raspberry Pi behind one - if only to pick up the network audio stream.

 

Well looks like I have some research to do.....

 

As a prototype you could try to fit that small DAC you have already Rob, inside the Quad. See if you can find a good PSU like to run it from and get it feeding a line input.

 

At least let me have some early warning if I need to start hunting for a Quad 44...before you push the prices up!

 

I'm using a separate DAC and don't see the problem. Does that mean there is no place for pre and power amps etc?

 

Product Marketing identified a product that they can sell, even though its not needed any more?

(I understand there are good reasons for separate pre and power amp boxes.)

 

Are you suggesting the Hi-Fi buying public don't have the intelligence to decide on what equipment they need to buy?
Perhaps you could offer a "System Appraisal Service" and using your knowledge advise them on future upgrades!

 

sorry, but what is the issue here? what are we debating? is it not the choice personally of an individual to choose what his fulcrom of musical equipment he or she is in perfect harmony with? regardless of make, and ruther than being lectured in someones selfish and personal views,! profit has dominated this industry via mags and overrelated reviews, and the eticuate of ego , avarice ruin what was once a enjoiment of a persoanally pride, IMO

 

Weeell... active speakers are best

 

Fook.. I wrote a long post and a miss-press of a button removed it all.

You are right Nando, people put a lot of pride in their careful choices of equipment.

Basically, differences between kit has got smaller as the technology has improved, while the game of advertising, reviews, dealers and hobby box swapping has stayed the same. They are out of sync. It's natural isn't it, that as tech gets more mature the differences get smaller? Yet if we read somone's opinion about a CD player today it will follow much the same lines as a review on a turntable cartridge written 40 years ago.

 

Simon, Your Onest Oppinion, Do You That Active Speakers Are Best?"joke" I Don't Think So Blasfemy,

 

My question was serious though put in a light hearted way, and not intended to cause offence. Its of course up to each of us to buy what we think suits our needs!

I have a DAC in a separate box but I wonder why this is still needed. The issue I would like to pose is whether there is a technical reason why a separate box for a DAC is needed. I would like to know if such a reason exists. Separate boxes add cost, cables etc and it seems to me a valid question to pose.

To clarify what I mean by technical in this context - I mean a reason based on the need to achieve the best sound quality.

 

Separate standalone DAC boxes are not necessary but they are a perfectly valid option.

Most mid priced CD players generally only have relatively poor DAC sections due to budget constraints. The DAC chip may be OK but chances are the circuit will be compromised with cheap poor quality power supplies etc. If you look in most cheap CDP you'll see a single small transformer powering everything and a single voltage reg supplying lots of IC's.

A separate high end DAC will likely have a better DAC chip and also much better power supplies and maybe a better clock etc. Generally speaking it may be like the DAC section from a really top end player. My last separate DAC had three separate transformers, two separate power supply boards something like 10 voltage regs and the PSU section was separated from the audio section by a copper screen. How many CDPs have that?

You could in theory improve these things in your existing CDP but that's going to be a lot of work and you might not have enough space. Of course a high end CD player will already have good power supplies, a good clock as so on and so forth but high end CD players are expensive.

With some exceptions (e.g. TDA1541) I think most people would agree that DAC chips have got better over the years. If you have a CD player with an internal DAC you'll be stuck with the original DAC chip however the transport itself may still be perfectly good. In fact some of the older transport mechs such as the Philips swing arm mechs are generally regarded as some of the best ever made and will probably outperform most modern mechs. If you have an old CD player with a good transport mech but a compromised DAC section an upgraded standalone DAC makes perfect sense.

But the killer argument for a separate DAC is that it can be used to upgrade lots of different sources. More and more music formats are going digital. A good DAC can be used to upgrade several sources not just your CDP for no extra cost. In this way standalone DACs can represent excellent value for money.

I always think that more boxes allows for greater flexibility in the upgrade patch. For example my pre-amp has been used with three different sets of power amps over the years. Another example would be my phono stage which has a separate PSU. A while ago I upgraded the PSU which brought a very significant sonic benefit at a modest cost (considerably cheaper than a better phonostage). If the PSU was not separate I couldn't have done this.

In the past I have owned two different standalone DAC boxes and I don't regret buying either of them.

However for what it's worth I now use a CDP with what I consider to be a good transport mech (Philips CDM 9) and one of the best DAC chips (TDA1541) because I felt this would give me the very best CD playback. Putting everything in one box makes more sense if CD is your only digital source. I do not have a streamer, I don't use my MP3 player for serious listening and I don't use my PC for music but if I did some/all of the above I would go down the route of a separate DAC instead.

Well that's the way I see things anyhow.

 

Thanks for your considered response You make some good points and I can only agree with the flexibility argument. I have followed the same philosophy, using a separate dac with different sources. In my case though I no longer have a CD player - everything is ripped first.

This has been ok when the pace of DAC development has been as rapid as it has been over the last few years. But as that slows down, the technology becomes a commodity and the cost falls, I fear that manufacturers will try to maintain the separate box philosophy for their own ends.

When will we reach that point? Or are we there already?