Firstly thank you for this site. I get tired of being led around by peoples opinion and its nice to just see the numbers and decide your own path on what you want to upgrade next.
I was hoping to replace my preamp and my dac this year and after finding this site I thought maybe I can just skip the pre-amp and go directly from my dac to my power amp and use the volume control on the dac.
However upon more reading I found that using a DAC as a preamp is not always the best idea. Basically a dac with the built in volute control is actually using a digital attenuator and this can be lossy. I was actually interested in the Matrix Audio X-SABRE Pro and came across a review on 6moons that stated this. Upon more reading I came across the same information about using digital attenuation.
Is this true? are there some dac's with built in volume control that are better than others? or using a digital volume control is just never a good idea.
I was always under the impression that you set the volume control on whatever media player your PC uses as highest. Also are the dac's out there that use a better method to control volume if I skip the preamp path.
I like the less is more approach to things. and would rather concentrate my budget into one piece if I can.
Should i just upgrade my dac and continue using my old preamp instead? I would appreciate some insight.
For reference I have a
Lite Audio 68 dac using spdif (i set the volume control on this to max)
Parasound P3 preamp
Parasound HCA3500 power amp
and some heavily modded polk sda 1.2TL's speakers
I have no plans to replace the power amp and the speakers I just wanted to do something different with the dac and pre. to do something new and different as well as get a dac that was cleaner and had some newer tech's from my old one. should I just keep the p3 and replace the dac and use the p3 for volume control.
ALL my source is digitally stored in lossless format.
I was hoping to replace my preamp and my dac this year and after finding this site I thought maybe I can just skip the pre-amp and go directly from my dac to my power amp and use the volume control on the dac.
However upon more reading I found that using a DAC as a preamp is not always the best idea. Basically a dac with the built in volute control is actually using a digital attenuator and this can be lossy. I was actually interested in the Matrix Audio X-SABRE Pro and came across a review on 6moons that stated this. Upon more reading I came across the same information about using digital attenuation.
Is this true? are there some dac's with built in volume control that are better than others? or using a digital volume control is just never a good idea.
I was always under the impression that you set the volume control on whatever media player your PC uses as highest. Also are the dac's out there that use a better method to control volume if I skip the preamp path.
I like the less is more approach to things. and would rather concentrate my budget into one piece if I can.
Should i just upgrade my dac and continue using my old preamp instead? I would appreciate some insight.
For reference I have a
Lite Audio 68 dac using spdif (i set the volume control on this to max)
Parasound P3 preamp
Parasound HCA3500 power amp
and some heavily modded polk sda 1.2TL's speakers
I have no plans to replace the power amp and the speakers I just wanted to do something different with the dac and pre. to do something new and different as well as get a dac that was cleaner and had some newer tech's from my old one. should I just keep the p3 and replace the dac and use the p3 for volume control.
ALL my source is digitally stored in lossless format.