Let's say that I wanted to measure the frequency spectrum of my DAC when playing back a sinewave.
To do this, let's say that I feed the output of my DAC into a 24bit ADC of average quality.
Let's further say that I take the optical toslink output from the ADC, and then feed it into my Macbook Pro that has a toslink audio input. And then, let's say I use REW software to generate a 24-bit dithered sinewave to feed the DAC over USB, and measure the resulting spectrum using REW RTA function with an averaged FFT display.
I've done this test and it seems to work. The result appears interesting but I can't tell if I can trust it or not. How would I go about validating it? How would I go about separating the extra harmonics produced by the (high quality) DAC from those produced by the (average) ADC?
To do this, let's say that I feed the output of my DAC into a 24bit ADC of average quality.
Let's further say that I take the optical toslink output from the ADC, and then feed it into my Macbook Pro that has a toslink audio input. And then, let's say I use REW software to generate a 24-bit dithered sinewave to feed the DAC over USB, and measure the resulting spectrum using REW RTA function with an averaged FFT display.
I've done this test and it seems to work. The result appears interesting but I can't tell if I can trust it or not. How would I go about validating it? How would I go about separating the extra harmonics produced by the (high quality) DAC from those produced by the (average) ADC?