Hi I am new here and i bought the D10 to pair with Edifier S2000pro active speakers, i don't know much about impedance and because it's just a DAC (and not an amp) and I use an RCA cable to connect to speakers will it cause issues because the speakers have built in amplifer inside.
Also when i plug the D10 the first time on Windows 10 will the drivers install automatically, or do I also have to download the drivers from the website
Hi,
I just looked on Edifier's site at those speakers. They are active meaning they have their own internal amplifier. From the literature it seems that their amplifier is actually a digital one and any analogue signals fed to them will be firstly converted to digital before going to the digital amplifier circuit and then the actual speaker driver/cone. These looks to be in the form of one speaker has the inputs, power and amp in and the other is driven from the first.
The D10 is a DAC with Line Level outputs as RCA connectors. You would connect the D10 RCA red/right and white/left to the same RCA inputs on the Edifier speaker with those connectors.
However, as the Edifier's will likely convert the D10's analogue input into digital you may as well run a S/PDIF cable from the Coax or Optical connectors on the D10 to the Edifier. No conversion then, simply Digital-to-Digital, let the speaker's amp do the single conversion.
If you do connect digitally, you may have issues with DSD material as I do not know what the D10 does with it regarding it's own digital outs.
A side note, you are right to be a little cautious about impedance. Thankfully we are dealing with line level and this makes life a lot easier - it is designed with 'dumb' consumers in mind, so it's mostly OK to hook up the way you think. Although, still best to always check.
On Windows 10 you can use Foobar2000 or JRiver or other good quality music player to play out via WASAPI push mode. You do not need drivers for this, and it will be bit-perfect, providing the player can do that. Being Class Compliant means no drivers needed.
If you want DSD playback then you will need the driver installed, I think, and a few components added to Foobar2000 - which are included with instructions in the download zip. The components for SACD/DSD are open source and the version included is a little older, although simpler to setup. The newer versions of the components may offer more functionality but are more confusing - DoP and DSD native and the displayed sample rates lead to some head scratching until it all clicks and you realise DoP is actually DSD just wrapped in a PCM package, and is lossless.
The driver allows for playback by ASIO, which you may prefer in terms of stability or may make no difference to WASAPI - but it isn't needed for HiRes PCM playback.
Note the driver installs a system tray icon (bottom right of task bar). It's located in the startup folder (shell:startup) so that it runs on each boot. It is not needed and can be run on demand with the start menu > Topping entry. Delete or move this startup file if you so wish.