[Eeyore]

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:

Trevor Wilson wrote:
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
I've been looking inside one of these at what components are used.
They seem overall to be pretty good eg AKM converters and 4580 opamps.
What I can't reconcile is why the DCX is so (comparatively) noisy
given the specs of the chips. There are a couple of possibilites that
I can see:
a) It uses a switching PSU for some reason instead of a linear
b) The signals after the DACs but before the opamp o/p are carried on
an unshielded ribbon cable

Any other ideas?
Am I being unreasonable?

**Yep. I've used the 2496 in several installations. It is very, very
impressive. It's S/N performance is excellent.


But nowhere near as impressive as the XTA at around $3500.
Why?

Possibly down to both a different DSP processor and the EQ algorithms used. You
can get serious internal clipping problems in digital equalisers esp at low
frequencies IIRC and that results in you having to discard what might otherwise
seem to be adequate headroom to compensate and that then brings up the noise
floor.

What's the DSP chip in the DCX2496 ? If it's that TI TMS something (TMS57002 ?)
, that'll be the problem.

Graham