if you don't need EQ and eye candy, no.
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Topping DX5 II
- Thread starter Matias
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Hm.. I didn't using EQ, just stock , coz like natural sound
thxThanks! One more thing (sorry too many things). Would you please ask them if dx5ii has the same quantization bug as D50III, and if yes, are there plans to fix it?
I believe many people care about that as well.
What is supposed to be natural sound? Really curious as EQ is used in all recordings and live concertsHm.. I didn't using EQ, just stock , coz like natural sound
Zipper
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PEQ adjustments aren't primarily meant to distort or change the original sound, but rather to tailor the sound to your specific headphones or speakers. Of course, you can tweak it for personal taste - like adding more bass or enhancing the soundstage or to better suit your music preferences, but that’s optional. If you're only using your device as a DAC and already have a working DX5 Lite, then the DX5 II would be unnecessary. However, the fine-tuning possible with PEQ can really help you get the most out of your sound setup. Personally, I wouldn't want to go without a PEQ.Hm.. I didn't using EQ, just stock , coz like natural sound
I agree, but if the DX5 Lite is already connected to a Windows PC, then installing eAPO and PEACE would be an easier way to explore the benefits of PEQ (I use it for both headphone and room correction).
I'll be sticking with eAPO/PEACE when my DX5 II arrives as PC is my primary use case, however I'll also have a Wiim Pro connected to it, so I will configure the on-board PEQ for the odd occasion where I listen without my PC on.
ziggurcat
Major Contributor
These are -- largely -- software issues, so it's quite typical.
Ongii
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I work for a software company, and our customers expect a delivered software which is bugs free. They pay a lot, so they expect us to do the dirty job of beta testing
ziggurcat
Major Contributor
If you work for a software company, then you would know that nothing is ever going to be bug-free.
edit: I worked in video game QA for quite a while (started in general QA, then eventually moved to PS3 compliance), so I stopped getting worked up over software bugs a long time ago.
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Well… Not really, there’s the lost art of good recording and good mic’ing (or for digital music choosing good source quality sounds), Al Schmitt a mix engineer that won the most grammys in history and the only one that has a star on the walk of fame famously never used eq unless he was mixing someone else’s recordings, and barely used compression as well, he was a master at recording and placing instruments in the soundstage, even with the advancement in technology and fidelity during the decades, his sound fingerprint stayed constant and well distinguishable. Here’s the thing (I’ll get a lot of poop from audiophiles for this): aside from the actual source quality and production, which can be argued and varies a lot, mix engineers and master engineers (sure there’s plenty of amateurs and bad ones as well like in any field) spend their lives, hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and tools and get paid thousands of dollars (the top ones) per song, working to exhaustion to squeeze every 0.x% improvement in each instrument and to make stuff translate and sound as good as possible in every system and according to the artist vision… And then Timmy cranks harmonic distortion from tubes on the master and yanks a 6db low shelf boost on the bass using a toy parametric eq in a dac (I’m sorry but none of these eq can compete in sonic quality with pro SOTA hardware and software eq)… Now, each consumer can do whatever they want, it’s their audio devices, their ears, their life… We live in a consumer world full of U eq curves (and because of that music is being currently mixed very mid heavy to counter this nonsense). But ideally they shouldn’t, there’s intention behind that sound choice and it should be respected, it shouldn’t be out to who listens but out to who makes the music, in that way professionals would also be recognized and be able to live off of their talents, there’s a reason Daft Punk RAM had a million dollar budget in realization and they dropped a fairly low volume/uncompressed album in the middle of the loudness war and now after 12 years is often praised by audiophiles as reference listening. That album was top of the line in every step and component of the chain. As for EQing for the sake of trying to improve the sound of a device to whatever target curve, my advice is to be conservative in that case as well, the amount of phase shift, pre-ringing (in case of linear phase eq), harmonics, etc. generated by eq can be pretty severe and destructive and while it may sound well for some material, it can be very destructive for other material, it totally depends on what you throw under it. I get it, a 600$ pair of headphones can sound better if you boost or cut stuff where it doesn’t reach, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with downsides as well.What is supposed to be natural sound? Really curious as EQ is used in all recordings and live concerts
An eq isn’t rocket science. I coded for myself a parametric eq with nonlinear shelves taking behaviors from a mix of very sought after outboard gear and I added auto gain compensation, cuts, parameter link (and inverse link), etc. but mind you people here for example complain about quantization noise in the eq, to remove the problem you should use double precision and then oversampling to avoid cramping and other best practices, it took me a week and I never coded dsp before (although I still know a lot of my field of work in its technical realm anyway even if never coded mixing tools first hand before) and I finished bug free. This eq with all the performance optimizations possible still cranks a 6% cpu in my new apple silicon processor for a single instance, I don’t know what kind of processing power these things carry, potentially a sharc processor would fix it, but I see it as improbable that the eq inside a dac like this can be of very high quality. I understand the usefulness when not using a computer with high quality eq plugins, but I would never bother using the internal one of the dac.
Asma
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As a DX5 MQA owner, I also asked myself this question. I use mine only for music.
Geez... wondering if I should just cancel my DX5 II order with Shenzhenaudio? It's been a month. Bought it for coaxial input PEQ and preamp capability. Meanwhile my L50 performs great. A separate DAC (coaxial) with EQ ability would just about cancel any further purchases for me. Maybe I'll wait for a different product...
Ongii
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Interesting arguments. Thanks.
Do you think a Fiio K17, with its DSP-dedicated chip, will therefore be better?
According to the specs, we will have independent PEQ for each output. Does this mean I can apply a high-pass filter to my passive speakers connected via XLR, and a low-pass filter to a subwoofer connected via RCA? Has anyone tested this? I'm aware of the issue with saving profiles, but that's a separate topic.
olieb
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Well that might be the case, but what is the difference of using a bright microphone to get more brightness compared to using an EQ plugin? That is basically the same thing, only with lesser choice in microphones.
But I agreee, if your are not too constrained in budget, you will not only find a mic that does the job but a mic that does it very well.
BTW most of the (older) recordings of Schmitt have been made on (analogue) equipment that had orders of magnitude more distortion than the "toy eq" in a modern dac.
And Schmitt seemed to have another preference for sugaring the signal.
That explains a bit why this kind of music sometimes tastes a bit like candy floss to me.
I do not know whether you noticed it, but there is a contradiction. If music nowadays is produced wrongly "mid heavy" because of market influence and customer nonsense, how do I arrive at "natural" sound without EQ? Not to mention the need to correct for the idiosyncrasies of my room or those of my ears (HRTF) and headphones (and no, a four figure price tag will not correct for that).
It might be able to handle better eq, but that eq should be well coded in first place, it's hard for me to say it's X or Y from a black box, for example via software I coded my own eq to have per band phase switch, this is a rarity even in the professional tools realm, I think there might be a commercial one available but I'm not even sure myself. And after I apply eq I check with analytical tools what I'm doing in that given situation: ok how is the phase shift? How are bands interacting between each other? How's the transient response? Should I use bands in series or parallel? The goal is to reduce distortion (as for mutation) of the original signal to the least possible. I can't do any of it using the little eq inside the app.
Of course if I need to bonk 12db (for whatever reason) somewhere in the spectrum then it's gonna affect the signal, otherwise I would be doing nothing to the signal in first place, but there's ways to do it, after decades of work and with good listening devices my ears can detect it: "ok I'm affecting the phase and having partial cancellations this way", "I'm smearing the transients a tiny bit if I'm doing this" etc.
If those operate simultaneously, they are one output to which only one EQ profile can be applied.
