"Dave Cook" wrote in message
Out of curiosity, I hooked up my DAC directly to my amp
just to hear what it would sound like without going
through my preamp. The DAC is fed by a Squeezebox Touch,
so I can use it's digital volume control for attenuation.
There seems to be no reason for addding anything else to the signal path if
this is the entire system.
I was rather shocked how much more vibrant and involving
the sound was.
Something is not what it seems here.
While the BAT 3ix preamp is not any good technican's idea of a good
general-purpose preamp by virtue of its poor performance into low impedance
loads (Please see
http://www.stereophile.com/tubepream...at/index4.html and frequency
response curve when driving a 600 ohm load), it should be OK for driving
your BAT VK-250 power amp due to its high input impedance. Of course, it may
have subtly failed in some non-obvious way except that it sounds bad.
It does make me wonder what the benefit
of all that electronics in a pre-amp really is.
In this system the BAT 3ix represents something that could possibly go awry
when it is completely unecessary as in an utterly simple system like this.
So I'd like to try going passive with something like a stepped
attenuator.
What is wrong with just using the digital attenuator in the DAC?
The most likely fault would be excessive noise when you turn its volume
down. Can you report on this?
There is a lot of audiophile myth and misapprehension about digital volume
controls, but a properly designed digital volume control can have many
practical and sonic advantages over common analog attenuators. For one
thing, channel balance of the digital volume control is likely to be
near-perfect, even at low volumes.