Amazing that when so many guys "go digital" they throw away their CD transport. And giving up the transport provides a leaner, cleaner, flatter, and more detail sound. This type of sound fits many tastes and is championed by the likes of the Computer Audiophile Geek and "Worthless to the Audio Fans" Robert Harley. When these reviewers hear a new analytical detail, they immediately call it BEST.
But many of those who care about musicality find that high end CD transports bring more emotion and palpability to the music. Despite so many brilliant minds on this board, I haven't been able to understand why... Yet here is one piece of evidence that may explain the differences...
"...The mathematical operations are most commonly performed within the DAC chip but some companies, like Chord, use an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) as this allows the DSP engineer almost unlimited flexibility in creating filters. Unless you want to keep increasing the number of filter coefficients, which Watts finds always gives a sonic improvement. The DAVE, for example, uses a Xilinx FPGA that allows a filter with 164,000 coefficients to be programmed. But even 164,000 taps was not enough for Watts, and the availability of a new Xilinx FPGA, the X7A200T, which has no fewer than 740 DSP cores, 215,360 logic cells, and 16MB of memory, allowed him to increase the number of taps to one million—actually 1,015,808!
So why is the filter in the Blu Mk.2 rather than the DAVE, I asked. "The FPGA draws up to 10A of current," Watts replied, "and DAVE's power supply just can't supply that much current without compromising the noise floor." The Blu can, he explained, so it made sense to put the filter in the Mk.2 version of the transport and feed the filtered data stream to DAVE...."
Now, despite the marketing hype, many people already prefer the Chord DAVE DAC to the well-marketed and overly hyped digtial gear, like dcs, msb, esotoric, and the super-duper analytical Berkeley REf. With the transport, the DAC goes to a much higher level...
https://www.stereophile.com/content/chords-million-tap-digital-filter
Are there any reviewers who are still fighting for the CD transport like "Fearless" Michael Fremer has been fighting for vinyl?
But many of those who care about musicality find that high end CD transports bring more emotion and palpability to the music. Despite so many brilliant minds on this board, I haven't been able to understand why... Yet here is one piece of evidence that may explain the differences...
"...The mathematical operations are most commonly performed within the DAC chip but some companies, like Chord, use an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) as this allows the DSP engineer almost unlimited flexibility in creating filters. Unless you want to keep increasing the number of filter coefficients, which Watts finds always gives a sonic improvement. The DAVE, for example, uses a Xilinx FPGA that allows a filter with 164,000 coefficients to be programmed. But even 164,000 taps was not enough for Watts, and the availability of a new Xilinx FPGA, the X7A200T, which has no fewer than 740 DSP cores, 215,360 logic cells, and 16MB of memory, allowed him to increase the number of taps to one million—actually 1,015,808!
So why is the filter in the Blu Mk.2 rather than the DAVE, I asked. "The FPGA draws up to 10A of current," Watts replied, "and DAVE's power supply just can't supply that much current without compromising the noise floor." The Blu can, he explained, so it made sense to put the filter in the Mk.2 version of the transport and feed the filtered data stream to DAVE...."
Now, despite the marketing hype, many people already prefer the Chord DAVE DAC to the well-marketed and overly hyped digtial gear, like dcs, msb, esotoric, and the super-duper analytical Berkeley REf. With the transport, the DAC goes to a much higher level...
https://www.stereophile.com/content/chords-million-tap-digital-filter
Are there any reviewers who are still fighting for the CD transport like "Fearless" Michael Fremer has been fighting for vinyl?