Ok after a brief interlude with LP pressings from early 1960's (love how
they list the microphones, tape deck, and cutter used to make the
record!) we are back with the project. We purchased a TEAC 501 DAC to replace the existing emotiva DAC 1. This DAC has 24/192 on all inputs, rca and XLR and supports DSD (and is reasonably priced - although it has been replaced by the 503).
My goal was to check out HDtracks digital files and DSD files for
comparison to other formats. I wanted to integrate this into my existing
Kodi media center as much as possible.
Equipment: Dell SFF 765 8gig/SSD/win7 x64 -->
Teac 501 --> Emotiva XSP-1 --> Wyred monoblocks --> Waveform Mach + Paradigm Active Servo 15.
First
test was hookup to an ancient Pioneer cd/dvda player using digital and
optical outs to listen to a bunch of old DVD audio discs. Impressive.
Second test was hookup to Emotiva ERC-3 cd player using digital and optical outs. No real difference noted.
Now to the meat - hooking it up to the PC. The first and biggest problem was
installing the driver .
Teac seems to have committed a serious boo boo by letting the digital certificate expire so that their driver is unsigned.
Once installed if you go into the control panel's device manager you see the problem. The
teacahsd.sys driver is disabled by windows because it is unsigned.
This is the latest version 108 of the driver, and i have not tested this
on other versions of windows besides win7 x64.
So how do you fake windows into thinking a driver is signed?
The workaround is to sign the driver and thanks to Zhang Pei at
http://www.yiiyee.cn/Blog/64signer/ you can download his app and
enable test signing
of the teacahsd.sys driver. So now i have a working device on my PC
that i can select in the Sound Control Panel as the output device. I
tested VLC, JRiver, the included
TEAC player and Media Monkey and they all worked fine and the
TEAC displayed the proper bitrate.
In
Kodi you have to go to system, settings and make Audio adjustments to
let it pass the bitrate of the source file and not to fix it lower or
upscale it. Once i got that set right and choose the proper audio output
we had 24/192 audio going to the
TEAC 501.
Before i did this the bitrate was fixed at 44. The benefit of Kodi is
that the display scales well to the LCD TV and the remote operates
everything from your armchair, plus once you setup a music source it
extracts all the metadata into the library - making browsing easier.
The HD version of Fleetwood Mac's
Rumours, in particular with the
Dreams
track. The vocals were ethereal, the acoustic guitar floated above the
throbbing bass line and the occasional bongo drum was very distinct. I
was disappointed in the HD version of
Billie Jean
from Thriller as the bass line seemed slower and had less impact that
the remastered CD version. But the opening track sequence on
Bad
was an awesome bass/drum combo. So i spend the evening sampling a
number of HD files and the results were hit and miss, when good they
were really, really good - better than anything else i have heard but
many were not as good as my CD copy and some were rather annoying -
overly harsh treble seemed a common culprit.
I left the FIR
settings alone and have not done any fiddling with the box, next steps
would be to try and figure out what the optimal settings are?
The external hard disk with all the DSD files plugged into the e-Sata port was not recognized by the PC. To be fixed... as a workaround i copied all the files to the local PC after cloning the SSD to a larger hard drive and putting that in the box.
Then down to listening. First off the old test standard - Dire Straights
Brothers in Arms. I have this on lp, cd, sacd, hdcd and now dsd so it
is a good test. The money for nothing track lacked the punch of the
remastered CD but the crickets at 3:10 on Across the River were very
distinct - much more than on the LP or original CD.
Continuing
on with the first Dire Straights i much preferred this digital file to
the cd versions. Anyway to cut a long evening short, after listening to
all the DSD files i had i came to the following conclusions:
- Some sounded better, ie more range, cleaner, clearer than the CD or HDtracks version
- Some
sounded worse that the CD or HDtracks or LP version, in particular less
dynamics, ie the intro to Billie Jean on Thriller is a good test - the
kick drum and bass line should be in your face (or at least in your
room)
This may be due to a number of factors, not sure how many of
these besides Pink Floyd's the
Endless River are native DSD, most are rips from SACD discs and i think
some have been converted to DSD from ripped CD's or vinyl. I have no DSD128
files for testing right now as i don't think anything is available yet in that format.
It may also be that the
original
sources were different (original cd vs remastered cd or lp). Typically i
have found that re-mastered CD's usually sound better but not always
(for example, i find the Steve Hoffman remasters have rather excessive
treble). When we think about it recorded tracks can be re-mixed,
boosted, equalized, compressed etc in many different ways and the result
sounds different. A good recording/mixing will sound good no matter
what. In fact, when switching between JRiver's pure DSD output and
Kodi's DSD to PCM output, i really could not hear a distinct difference.
So the
TEAC does as good job
decoding digital audio from the PC to my analog 2.1 setup. Some
recordings are reference quality some are meh. Does this replace my CD
and LP collection? No. But it does add a great convenience factor as
by using Kodi as the media center i can surf my digital music collection
from my armchair using the remote and the sound is quite good. I can
also use internet radio and get a good sound (esp from Radio
Switzerland, bye bye CBC2), plus the sound from streamed movies and TV
shows is quite acceptable.
The only part left to research is the
filters which are named fir1, fir2 etc - great naming job! I am sure
marketing pushed for names like Tube and Vinyl. Actually, that is what i
want - a filter than would make some of the digital files a little
softer... maybe this fall/winter may start researching inserting a DSP
unit to the chain to pre process the sound before converting to analog.
PS - at first i found the lack of a remote control somewhat disturbing but now i don't. Before listening i turn on the
Teac
and after listening i turn it off and since it is only used for pc
audio no switching inputs is needed and i don't change settings on the
fly so all is good.
And now back to the 50's with
Sarah Vaughan....oh my
