Source
r/BudgetAudiophile•
StringerBull

Question: Analog or digital signal into receiver before DSP and Audyssey?

Is it a lot better to feed a digital signal into a Denon receiver that's applying DSP and Audyssey than it is to use a high quality external DAC and feed that to the receiver through an analog input?

I would guess that it's better to just feed the digital signal into the receiver, given that an analog signal would otherwise need to go through an additional conversion back to digital before being processed and converted back to analog.

The exception would be the "direct" mode, which circumvents DSP entirely. In that case, if the DAC on an external box is theoretically better than on the Denon receiver, it would be better to run an analog signal into the receiver.

Is all of that ^ accurate?

Posted Aug 19, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

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neomancr•

It seems like audyssey is passive filtering to me so it wouldn't really matter.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

0
StringerBullOP•

I guess I'm more just asking what the consequence of converting from analog to digital and then back to analog actually is.

Are the converters in a typical $500 Denon receiver substantially good or is there a good amount of signal degradation when converting an additional 2 times (3 times total)?

I'm happy to use the optical ports to play audio through but I also have a decent DAC coming out of my computer and I'm wondering if feeding the DAC into analog ports on the receiver might produce better sound (at least in direct mode). If DSP is involved, then I guess it makes the most sense just to run digitally to the receiver so that there's only a single digital-analog conversion.

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