2. digital
  3. 1348360185

MW Oppo 83 vs. Macbook pro

When a friend let me borrow his Nuforce DAC-9 I was blown away with how good it sounded. In fact my Modwright tube Oppo 83 sounded better when it went through the dac versus without the dac! I posted a short review of the DAC-9 on the Polk Audio forum here: http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?135994-Nuforce-DAC-9

So today as an experiment I used my Macbook pro laptop using itunes, Bitperfect, a cheap usb cable and the Dac-9 vs. my MW Oppo/Dac-9 combo. I played the same song and toggled between the inputs on the Dac and I was just shocked to hear that they sounded virtually the same! I tried several more cd's and came to the conclusion that my Macbook pro sounded just a smidgen more clear, but it was hardly noticeable. I'm still trying to digest this finding.

Obviously, I'm late coming into the computer audio world. My findings today are a game changer for sure. This will change my whole approach to audio now. I'm also sure that with more tweaking I can take this up another couple notches with a nicer cables, tweaking the features on the Bitperfect program, more RAM, etc.

I noticed that in the middle of my experiment the music from my laptop started to collapse and crackle. I checked it out and found that the computer was in the middle of receiving an email and this heavily impacted the music. So I shut down all open programs and that seemed to fix it.

I also ordered a Belkin Gold USB cable, which hopefully will be better than the stock usb cable I hijacked from my printer. The latest issue of TAS did a shoot out on 5 USB cables and the reviewer had been using the Belkin Gold as his reference. Of course he upgraded after doing the shoot out, but for $11, I owe it to myself to hear the Belkin Gold.
128x128erndog

Showing 1 response by plato

plato
1,543 posts
 
Yeah, well, what it comes down to is that many computers/laptops can match or exceed very good quality stand-alone transports (especially if your files are stored and played from a solid-state memory card or flash drive). You're still using the NuForce DAC-9 either way so your results shouldn't be too big of a shock.

If you use a program like J. River and Google Chrome as a browser your computer music may sound even better. In fact you can get much higher resolution files on your computer than anything they put on the CD format and that would take you up another notch or two. Welcome to computer hi-fi.
More to discover