Hi Everyone,
I'm a music maker. I've been making electronic music for over 20 years. My first priority was usually musical instruments, outboard FX, audio interfaces and powered monitors. Over the years I've focused more on investing in gear that is used to listen to music rather than make it.
I have a general question after I watched a few review videos of an RME ADI-2 DAC FS which I just bought). One of these videos said that the ADI-2 wasn't quite as good as another DAC. He lost me when he started talking about interconnects and measuring sine waves. But it got me thinking again about a fundamental question that has popped into my head now and again.
Considering that the AD/DA devices that have made the music, and mastered the music, could very well have been RME, Lynx, Apogee, Metric, how can anyone claim that a consumer DAC can somehow resolve things above and beyond what was printed through the AD/DA mastering stage? I can understand that a DAC could be revealing less than a source, but if pro audio, and the music makers have used RME, how could another DAC be somehow better?
I use this guy sometimes to master my music. There's a Weiss DS1, EQ1, RME, and other top shelf pro audio gear. If you mastered through an RME UCX, then bought the RME ADI-2 Pro FS R BE and claimed the DAC is better - that may be true, but you're not going to hear anything above and beyond what the (inferior) mastering DAC did... nor are you going to hear much between top tier consumer DACs, or am I missing something?
Isn't the "best" DAC, the flattest with no audible distortion? To claim this DAC or that DAC is better, as a listener, seems to be nothing but subjective preference. Can you get flatter than a straight line? Apparently so..
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Video is here