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Do my cheap CD player sound better than my Maverick D1 DAC?

elnaldo

elnaldo

Lunatic Member
Does my cheap CD player sound better than my Maverick D1 DAC?

I noted this tonight... Fixing my mother's cheap Samsung CD player, just wanted to test it, and put any CD I had at hand: Amelie film soundtrack...

Many piano and accordion solos on that CD.

And I was surprised by how good they sounded in my system, better than what I remembered, so I took the FLAC version in my computer, just to compare, and the piano and metallic notes of the accordion are now "unlistenable" in my DAC... It does a kind of vibration, or distortion, like a metal string vibrating at high frequencies, and a kind of background noise, like hi-freqs reverbs, behind the music. It's hard to describe it with my limited english.

The sound on the CD is sweet and natural, much more pleasant to listen to it.

I'm talking about a MAVERICK D1 "Plus", with tube and Opamp upgrades. I've tried both tube and SS outputs, and both are the same. Swapped inteconnects and inputs, and the result is the same.

Do you think this is normal? Could it be the higher resolution of the DAC, combined with my "mid-fi" amp?

But, to be honest, I want to keep this CD player and forget about the DAC, at least with this kind of acoustic music....
 
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Maybe just a bad file ? Have to tried to re-rip the cd you talking about ? But maybe indeed this is the way the DAC sound againts your cd player which seem to be more laid-back.
 
The file was riped 2 times, as FLAC and as 320kbps mp3, but using the same software. I could try the cd player connected to the DAC and compare... But those piano strokes are much more pleasant in the cheap cd player. ...

Edited : Tried the digital output from cd to the DAC and the sound is ok. Now I need to check the files. I'll try Just extracting the audio files without any encoding. i'm using ASUNDER CD RIP to convert to FLAC.

I'll discard the software too, burning the mp3 version to a CD and playing it with the CD player. I'm currently using AIMP 2 to play sound files.
 
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Well, after reading for 2 days about audio players software, ended with MPD playing my files, it sounds much better now... I'll do some AB comparison when everything is plugged in.

So it seems it's a software issue, not the DAC, and not the files... I thought every software was almost the same until today...
 
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