I searched through all of Amir's reviews of multichannel preamps, and I made a list of all the ones that have balanced outputs. The rest of my system has balanced interconnects, and I want to keep the entire analog signal chain balanced if possible.
So I made a list, and the recurring theme is that these devices do not seem to perform very well compared to modern DACs. My list:
Has anyone tried to dig any deeper to figure out where the performance issue comes from? Is it from processing the digital signal, or is it the DACs themselves?
I imagine with 16+ DACs in a single unit, a company would be tempted to choose something cheaper. But if the DACs were better, would the audio quality be better?
I'm asking because I recently bought a MiniDSP HTx, which rates top of the chart for SINAD...but it doesn't decode multichannel audio. And I don't have a multichannel preamp, though I'm curious about going that route.
What I'd like to know is, what happens if I get a relatively inexpensive AVR/ preamp that can decode the audio, and then send a digital signal to my HTx?
Would I end up with the high quality audio the HTx's review indicates it is capable of? Or would I still get the noisier/ lower quality audio described by the preamp reviews?
So I made a list, and the recurring theme is that these devices do not seem to perform very well compared to modern DACs. My list:
Has anyone tried to dig any deeper to figure out where the performance issue comes from? Is it from processing the digital signal, or is it the DACs themselves?
I imagine with 16+ DACs in a single unit, a company would be tempted to choose something cheaper. But if the DACs were better, would the audio quality be better?
I'm asking because I recently bought a MiniDSP HTx, which rates top of the chart for SINAD...but it doesn't decode multichannel audio. And I don't have a multichannel preamp, though I'm curious about going that route.
What I'd like to know is, what happens if I get a relatively inexpensive AVR/ preamp that can decode the audio, and then send a digital signal to my HTx?
Would I end up with the high quality audio the HTx's review indicates it is capable of? Or would I still get the noisier/ lower quality audio described by the preamp reviews?