Synergy is about the most useless audio platitude I can imagine. I'm not trying to be rude, seriously, but it's so absolutely objective as to be absurd. It's like saying "get the best white base you can" when buying paint.
DAC or CD Player. Help!
Dumb question but I am new to the Hi Fi Field. When you hook up an DAC to your CD player which unit is dictating the sound that you hear. Does the CD Player really matter or is the CD player running the sound? Thanks!
Showing 5 responses by wmarkhall
Forgot the question :) .. if the transport isn't shite (most middling+ CD players) then I'd say the DAC. Rarely, if ever, the cables. On both the desktop and main system I use Cambridge players, and both run the signal to a DAC. A NAD 1050 and Arcam irDAC. I run them that way because I'm convinced through trial and error that they sound better dumping their 1 and 0s to the aftermarket DACs. Having said that, when I was using a 1st generation DAC Magic (Cambridge) I couldn't hear enough difference to matter. In fact, that DAC sounded brighter in comparison to the CD player alone. |
I get the point of what people are saying with "synergy," but unless you live in an audio shop, who has the money to throw a grand or two here and there to determine which component of the many they read about is 'the one' to mate with components they already own? I have to conclude that a lot of what 'synergy' means is whatever the poster thinks sounds good at that moment. Until he buys something else, of course, at which point the synergy changes to that. PS: expensive cables do. not. matter. |
Worse than the AC cable snake oil is without doubt the cable risers. Spend major bucks on foo-foo cable jackets and 'flex' mesh pixie powder that they slip over the three-layer cable jacket only to determine that if the cable lays on the floor the sound is diminished. That's not synergy, it's idiocy. |
I still and will always contend that expensive boutique cables are 100% snake oil. Some of the priciest manufacturers of this stuff hedge their claims 10 ways to Tuesday while struggling to make a case for their HUGE markups. Take Zu Audio. I'll drop in the link at the bottom to their take on cable burn-in, but first you have to know why cable burn-in is even an issue. You pay 10-20x per foot what a decent piece of Belden or Monoprice cable costs and even though you want to hear that astounding difference your mind is telling you something else. So if the industry floats long burn-in times for cable, guess what's likely to happen after you've listened to these cables for many hours? That's right, you keep them. Or the return policy has expired. Either way you own them now. Take a look at Zu's take on burn-in. Count the weasel-words like "seems to", "potential to," and the endless prevarication and unsubstantiated claims, even when it involves their own "heavy investments in exploiting the phenomenon" did they actually write that? Yes, they did! They also write copious words signifying nothing to end with this: "If they don’t sound awesome right out of the box, please give them time to loosen and warm up." Read it for yourselves, and remember, snake oil comes off pretty easily. Buy yourself a spool of Monoprice 12AWG speaker wire, make two cables and then run a blind listening test whereby someone else switches them for your big buck foo-foo cable and guess which cable is hooked up. Run this test 5-10 times over the course of a couple days. Give it time. Track the guesses. There's power in truth; save all that money and buy music with it. That is why you've invested 1000s in gear, right? http://www.zuaudio.com/questions-list/2013/8/18/what-is-burn-in |