Digital Outs

Posted by: Scott Mckenzie on 02 October 2001

I ahve a lonely Nait 3R at the moment which is running with an Arcam 7SE and Mordaunt Short MS814. I really want to upgrade my speakers to Dynaudio Contour 1.1's but including the price of some decent stands I am looking at spending approx £1000. I have been offered a good price for my Arcam and therefore I could quite conceivably buy a CD3 for very little outlay (and in future sell it for similar money to buy either 3.5 + HI or CDX etc..) however, I have a Minidisc player in my car (for the whole difficult to damage and pretty good sound quality) however I record my discs from my Arcam onto my home Minidisc deck using a digital output.

After all that my question is does the CD3 (or 3.5) have a digital output, or am I going to have to connect the MD player using a Tape llop sort of arrangement?

Please help as I have also seen the CD3 I would like.

Scott

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Chris L
If it's any help, I did a back-to-back test recording to my MD unit using the digital output on my DVD player and the tape loop on my 32.5. I actually preferred the analogue recording, and have continued to use that method ever since. The only extra hassle is that it doesn't always catch the track separation on CD's, so you have to do it manually - or not at all, which is my usual.

Chris L

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by BrianD
Scott

Can't you use your PC?

Brian

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Andrew L. Weekes
Daveyp is right, but unlike Chris I prefer the digital transfers I make to minidisc to the analogue ones. This is with a portable unit, mileage may vary with full-size units. It's also using a reasonable transport with a low-jitter clock within. Obviously jitter will increase with the digital transfer, but I still prefer it

As an aside my Sharp benefits from a good external supply, in the same way a walkman pro does.

It's a shame Naim don't fit one for this purpose, although I can understand why many would be tempted to use it for an external DAC and consequently affect Naim's image if poor sounding systems resulted from it.

There is no reason why a digital ouptut could not be implemented without affecting the players performance, although there will be an impact on price.

If you get a modern soundcard (e.g. soundblaster live) some versions have a digital o/p - could be a cheap option.

Andy.

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Scott Mckenzie
Thnaks Andrew, I will probably look into the sound card option. I know Sony know do a unit you can connect to your PC but I think it is quite expensive and minimal outlay is needed right now. The other option I have is to use my Dad's/Girlfriends stereo to hook up to the MD player.

Thanks folks

Scott

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Steve Catterall
quote:
There is no reason why a digital ouptut could not be implemented without affecting the players performance

Actually I remember a post from Julian V about the very subject, where he stated that this was exactly why they hadn't implemented one.

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Martin Payne
quote:
Date: 31-Mar-98 14:41
Author: julian vereker
Subject: DPA


Are they back in business? The reason we don't put a digital output is not so much the extra circuitry, but if one enables the digital out, noise is radiated around the place which increases the jitter.

Jitter wasn't in the audiophile's vocabulary until we started to make single box players and drew attention to TIME in the digital domain.

julian

Posted on: 02 October 2001 by Andrew L. Weekes
Thanks Martin,

JV's comments make interesting reading, as always. I'm hardly in a position to argue the point, but I find it difficult to believe that, with sufficient care in implementation, it would not be possible to implement a digital I/O without degrading primary playback performance.

The cost may be greater than I anticipated, but care with layout / screening would make it feasible, I'm sure.

There's plenty of alternatives so I'll just stick to a non-Naim player for digital transfers.

Andy.

Posted on: 03 October 2001 by Martin Payne
quote:
Originally posted by Andrew L. Weekes:

JV's comments make interesting reading, as always. I'm hardly in a position to argue the point, but I find it difficult to believe that, with sufficient care in implementation, it would not be possible to implement a digital I/O without degrading primary playback performance.


IIRC, JV's contention was that connecting anything to the required pin(s) on the decoder (?) chip in the Philips chipset caused this problem.

This must be understood in light that lowest possible jitter appears to be a primary design goal, and the required extra care spent on this aspect would give an even better jitter performance without the digital out, and so is probably already there in the design.

Can't win, it seems.

Interesting note for spec freaks - JV claimed the CDSII to have 1/100th the jitter of the CDX, and that this is what gave it it's 'analogue' type character.

cheers, Martin

Posted on: 03 October 2001 by bam
Martin,
Does this imply that the re-clocking of the digital signal occurs upstream of the Philips chipset? If not, wouldn't the added jitter get removed? Unless you mean JV wanted to avoid undue jitter in the digital out.
BAM
Posted on: 03 October 2001 by Andrew L. Weekes
quote:
This must be understood in light that lowest possible jitter appears to be a primary design goal, and the required extra care spent on this aspect would give an even better jitter performance without the digital out, and so is probably already there in the design.

It may be with later designs, but a significant factor in the reduced performance of, for example, a CD3 is jitter in the DAC clock.

At players from CDX up I'm happier to accept the argument, but with the CD3 (CD3.5 / 5 use a different chipset) the master clock is a textbook implementation, using the inbuilt gate of the DAC. Jitter may be lower than other's implementations of the same circuitry, for numerous reasons (improved PSU's, maybe lack of digital IO) but I'm not convinced at this product level.

What I cannot see, but am happy to admit to having no actual experience to back the claim, is that the addition of digital IO would degrade the jitter spec of the clock by a greater amount than can be gained by improving it for very little cost.

You really should hear the CD3 I've been listening to recently, a cynical person could form the opinion that it's performance has been specifically 'hobbled' - not me though wink

Andy.

Posted on: 03 October 2001 by Martin Payne
More from JV:-

quote:
noise cannot be eliminated, but even if you succeed in reducing it at a certain point, it is very easy, in the noisy environment inside of a CD player, to get the noise induced back into the data signal - it also happens that many of the chips one might use for data processing introduce their own noise (read 'jitter').

There is no one solution.


He also said that the only place that jitter really mattered was the input to the DAC.

cheers, Martin

Posted on: 08 October 2001 by Steve G
I like the convenience of recording mini-discs digitally so when I upgraded my CD to a 3.5 I kept an older player in the system purely as a digital source for recording.

In the same way I have a spare integrated amp in my bedroom system (wired through the tape loops) for headphone use.

Posted on: 09 October 2001 by Phil Sparks
You may not want to clutter up your hi fi with another CD - just for digi out, but I noticed that most cheap DVD players - even the £100 from Tesco variety have optical outputs. So you could use one of these to get the bits into your mini disk. You might have one already - worth a look round the back.

Phil

Posted on: 09 October 2001 by Scott Mckenzie
I have more or less decided that the best bet will be to ensure that my 'soon to be purchased' (i.e. when I can get of my arse and decide which one I want and then ACTUALLY buying it) DVD player has a digital out, as these sems to be the most cost efficient way as I want a DVD player too.

Cheers for all the advice guys

Scott

P.S. Now please read my new topic CD3 vs 3.5