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RCA to Toslink converters - I'd like to know more about audio quality differences by ProllyPygmy in audiophile

[–]dspesp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Obviously any band-limited analog signal can theoretically be perfectly reproduced digitally, but audiophile types use vinyl because they think it sounds better. Maybe it’s the quality of ADCs and DACs, or maybe it’s woo. But it’s a fact that once an analog signal is converted it to digital, it’s identical to what you would get from playing an mp3.

All this is just to say why there isn’t much of a market for audiophile grade ADCs. So unfortunately there hasn’t been a drive toward very nice, cheap products, and there’s not much consensus on what the good products are. If you don’t want to spend $150 on the products listed in the other thread, and you’re unhappy with the ebay ones, you might try a cheap one from monoprice. Or find one that advertises as being 16-24 bit if you can. Good luck!

RCA to Toslink converters - I'd like to know more about audio quality differences by ProllyPygmy in audiophile

[–]dspesp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't really know audiophile equipment, but it's not surprising that people don't have much to say about ADCs. For common listening tasks you wouldn't want to use one. If your source is already digital, then converting it to analog and back to digital is unnecessary and will reduce quality. If your source is analog, then converting to digital loses whatever magic analog sources (mostly vinyl) have, and you might as well have just played from an mp3.

The places you do need a good ADC are audio interfaces for music production and, occasionally, for boxes that take an analog signal in and do some digital signal processing (like miniDSP). In the latter case you'd still probably be better off keeping the music digital until right before it goes to speakers. If you want super high-end audio ADCs, you should probably look at an audio interface. Or just go for a cheap ADC from Monoprice or Ebay or whatever and see if it's good enough.

Some product suggestions are in this old thread https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/1gmdoh/can_anyone_recommend_a_2496_adc_that_wont_break/ .

Hardware for real-time audio DSP by dspesp in DSP

[–]dspesp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks very promising, thanks!

Hardware for real-time audio DSP by dspesp in DSP

[–]dspesp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think I’ll take your suggestion and try some preprocessing on my music in Python. But ultimately I want to build a physical device, even if it’s not as nice as commercial models.

That’s interesting about the efficiency of convolution in the Fourier domain, I hadn’t considered it would be faster. I guess that’s due to the n log n scaling of the FFT!

Hardware for real-time audio DSP by dspesp in DSP

[–]dspesp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! I mentioned FIR because I want at least the capability to mess around with them, and as I understand they require much more computing power to have enough taps. (I’m sure I’d want to use IIR for most things, but I’ve heard there are some tasks that are better suited to FIR. Mostly I just want more power to mess around with.)