Digital out

Well I've changed my heart and mind and I'm going back to analog rca after reanalysis. ...

Well I've gone back to digital link.
After comparing Phil Collins But Seriously CD Album in Digital and analog link I found that the drums had much more detail (sound less splashy).
Which comes to make me think how people say that a system with more detail reveals more flaws in a flawed recording.
Could this be happening?

Absolutely!  "More detail" doesn't mean we should assume that all the details are good!  However, when extremely subtle differences are being compared, "more detail" tends to become subjective at some point.  A good A/B test should put that to rest.

Thanks for the reply MC hopefully that has put this question to rest.

Maybe I have found out why two dvd players sound different with the same toslink digital output used to my panasonic receiver.

I'm comparing the sony to my new pioneer dvd player.
Maybe the sony dvd player resamples 44.1khz to 48khz.
Maybe the panasonic receiver resamples everything to 48khz anyway but the sony does a better job of it.

Can someone come up with another explanation?
This thing is really puzzling me.

Sorry, I don't have anything useful to say here, but this is a revived old thread that dates from before I joined the forum here, and it just reminded me of some old net humour I encountered many years ago.  It's a posting apparently from the rec.audio.high-end newsgroup (though all attributions have been lost, except for the name "Mark"), and it describes why coax is to be preferred for digital transmission.  It probably should go in OT, but I enjoyed it enough to think it deserves another outing, about a decade down the track...

What's the concensus on the AT&T connectors as opposed to coax?  I've heard all the Toslink-bashing, but it seems that AT&T would be fairly serious about good fiber connections.

Quite obviously, coax is the *IDEAL* medium for digital transmission because it provides essentially *perfect* rejection of any spurious non-digital signals.

When the size of the coax cable is properly matched to the font of the digital source, 1's flow (lengthwise) down the center conductor while 0's pass (broadside) down the shield -- and NO other numbers can get through.

Unfortunately, many low-cost A/D converters and CD transports save money by using cheap, public-domain fonts in which the 0's are oval rather than perfectly round.  The resulting null-distortion causes unnatural (and easily recognizable) compression of the sound stage. This effect can be partially corrected by using specially designed coax with a slightly oval cross-section.

WRT the transmission of 1's, there are two competing bodies of opinion.  Most purists tend to favor the minimalist approach of using a sans serif font with a solid center conductor;  however, some recent studies suggest that there may be real benefits to a twisted center conductor in combination with a slight serif at the base of the 1's.  Apparently, the serif allows the 1's to engage the spiral conductor and impart a stabilizing spin -- in much the same way that the ogive at the base of an artillery shell engages the rifling in the gun barrel.

hope this helps,

Mark

Maybe O's should be sent down instead of zero's.
Fiber has no ground, that's why coax sounds better! (not!)

Does the cd transport play a role?
I remember PC CD-ROMS had different error rates stated in their specification's. The cd I'm comparing is lightly scratched.
Correct me if I'm wrong but maybe another possibility is that the sony transport is reading the cd more accurately.
The sony dvd player reads the TOC much faster than the pioneer,
but maybe this has to do with how fast the servo chip is. Have a good laugh if this doesn't make sense.  

The idea that one or more of your players is resampling is worth pursuing.  If you can get ahold of a DAT machine or some other digital recording device that tells you obviously and exactly what the incoming stream is, and it never leaves 48KHz regardless of what you've put in the tray, well, I think you can see where I'm going with this.

I have found out the output rates.
The sony outputs digital in 48khz regardless of source.
The panasonic outputs 44.1khz and 48khz in digital.
Could this be it? Can a 4.1khz increase in sampling rate improve the audio? It must be yes.    Maybe there is less jitter.

Great.  The Sony uses the same screwed-up logic as Soundblaster, Turtle Beach, and motherboard sound cards.  Unless the Sony player outputs the resampled audio at 24 bit (and it won't), this is a lossy process.  If the D-A converted lossiness is attractive to your ears for some reason or another, fine.  But it is lossy.

The other reason this stinks is the inability to play DTS encoded CDs, which is the finest compressed multichannel format, and far too often undiscovered or overlooked.  If your player resamples 44.1 to 48, then it will be impossible to send a DTS stream to your external receiver-decoder and have it resemble anything like valid data.

My el cheapo Sony DVD-VCR combo supports this.  Funny your Sony doesn't.

Yes I agree. But maybe the panasonic receiver sounds better with 48khz,
because it has a poor reconstruction filter. And increasing the sample rate improves aliasing rejection and quantization noise. (but I don't know). Anyway the sony definetely has the better picture quality than the other ones. I checked up on the video decoder chip in the sony player and it is the same chip used in more expensive players. (with less features of course).    

I decide to test what I could of the Sony DVD player here. I recorded a selection via S/PDIF with the player playing an audio CD.  As a control, I recorded the same thing  analogue out of player to analogue in of soundcard.

Digital transfer recording went fine with the soundcard and program set at either 44.1 or 48, but the 48kHz recordings were definitely wrong. They played back at a speeded up rate when the soundcard was back on its own clock. This seems to say that the DVD player's digital output is at 44.1. Apparently the soundcard does not care when it is not told the true sampling frequency of the S/PDIF input.

CDs sound very good played on this player, at least to me. I don't know if I could tell, were they being resampled to 48kHz, but since the digital doesn't resample, it seems unlikely that the analogue does.