Pleasantly surprised.........
......... I picked up a new phone yesterday - Sony Ericsson W980. I read that it had an internal 8gb memory, it looked decent, I got it. Having no Ipod, the plan was to put some tunes on the new phone and use it in the gym, train etc. When unpackaging I found a cable that I had not seen before. At one end the Sony phone adaptor and the other right and left analogue cables! I might be naive but isn't this fairly new? The said cables are not even mentioned in any of the papers that came with the phone and there is a "Music" booklet which explains how to (illegally) rip mp3s from your cds and put them on the W980!
Anyway, I sent some songs across to the phone last night and when everyone had gone to sleep, I had a quick A and B session. The album of choice was Stanley Road by the Modfather. I hooked the r an l cables to my Cambridge 840A and plugged in the phone. I then popped in the cd. I was shocked at how good the sound was straight from the phone to my amp. Absolutely shocked. I was expecting it to sound bad. At least as average as mp3s downloaded to cd sound. It was better than that. The cd sounded better of course but it wasn't the case of "ouch" once listening to the mp3 straight afterwards. All the mp3s are 320kbps and I did not have it on at any great volume. I will try again when I have more time on Thursday and Friday (I'm on holiday from then!).
Here is a question to JD and others. Could I connect the phone to an external DAC like the Beresford or similar with the analogue cables or do you need to use a digital connection?
Andrew Everard:You'd need a digital connection, Mr Snail.
Thanks Andrew - I suppose digital to analogue converter says it all! Anyway around it that you know of?
Not really - best to use it straight into your amp in analogue.
Or better still, from the original computer source through digital out, via a decent DAC.
It is quite amazing how good some of these cheap mp3 players and phones sound, but at the price they still won't touch the likes of a cheapy Beresford...
fr0g:Or better still, from the original computer source through digital out, via a decent DAC.
It is quite amazing how good some of these cheap mp3 players and phones sound, but at the price they still won't touch the likes of a cheapy Beresford...
I got home yesterday and played the same album a bit louder and I heard what I expected the first time. At the end of the day though, it's a handy extra to have even if I rarely use it. I do plan to get a media center extender set up and I would get a decent DAC - maybe even spend more than the Beresfords.
I still can't get my head around how flac files sent from pc, via extender to DAC and then to amp will sound as good as my Arcam disc spinner playing proper cds, which sounds delicious!
Gerrardasnails:
fr0g:Or better still, from the original computer source through digital out, via a decent DAC.
It is quite amazing how good some of these cheap mp3 players and phones sound, but at the price they still won't touch the likes of a cheapy Beresford...
I got home yesterday and played the same album a bit louder and I heard what I expected the first time. At the end of the day though, it's a handy extra to have even if I rarely use it. I do plan to get a media center extender set up and I would get a decent DAC - maybe even spend more than the Beresfords.
I still can't get my head around how flac files sent from pc, via extender to DAC and then to amp will sound as good as my Arcam disc spinner playing proper cds, which sounds delicious!
Heh. The CD spinner does the same thing, except it reads the data in real time from a spinning loose disc. The bit connected to your amp is still a DAC , just that it is in the same box as the CD transport.
The PC has done the hard part, of spinning the disc, and saved a copy of the same data on a far better 'transport' - the hard drive. The only difference is the fact that the DAC is in a different box. It really doesn't care where it gets its digital image of your music track from. All it wants to do is read it, and spit it out as an analoge signal
But in the end, the Beresford is unlikely to improve much if at all on the Arcam...(but would certainly bring your PC based music up to the same level)
Is using a seperate dac the best way of doing this?
Would a decent Amplifier with good internal DACs be as good?
Yes, or a decent CDP with a digital input. I use a Sonos & Cyrus DAC/XP and the sound is as good as my CDP.
You'd need a digital connection, Mr Snail.
Consulting Editor, What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision/whathifi.com Audio Editor, Gramophone