dacmagic upgrade to stagedac?

[flognuts]

Would this be considered an upgrade in sound quality? or more a sideways trade, with no difference?

had the dacmagic a couple of years, just scoping out other options.

[BusinessEvolution]

Think it will depend on the resolution of your other components of your sounds system and also your usage patterns. The StageDac, is better for jitter correction, the dacs are slightly better, and most of the digital inputs are slightly better. The USB is largely worse, as I think it only supports 16/48mhz (depends what you are listening too). Its a least slighly better but I have no clue whether its noticeable or not. Hopefully I pray soon I will have a stagedac but I won't have a dacmagic plus to A/B. It also has the crossfeed filter design, so it depends what genres you listen to and how good your headphones are.

[Marcus]

It's unlikely to be as big an upgrade as an amp upgrade would be, in your setup. Even then we would be talking the realms of refinement as opposed to massive differences

[flognuts]

ok thanks marcus.

[BusinessEvolution]

Hurry up shipping containers.

Nooo why have I got the 14th circled, may the audio gods have mercy.

[flognuts]

LOl let us know how much of an "upgrade" it is over the Xonar stx Business.

[BusinessEvolution]

LOl let us know how much of an "upgrade" it is over the Xonar stx Business.

what I am interested in knowing is if I run from the coaxial out of the STX to the Stagedac, is the STX still the audio quality base line?

I might try with both USB and from the STX out. I look forward to the stagedac as I'll be able to use it with my laptop too hopefully.

I don't even know whether I'll be able to tell any difference yet lol.

[theeyealtering]

what I am interested in knowing is if I run from the coaxial out of the STX to the Stagedac, is the STX still the audio quality base line?

This is something I am confused about too. My current understanding is that the coaxial on the STX is a bit perfect digital signal. It won't go through the DAC and output stage on the STX at all.
Same should be true if you ran the Stagedac off a coaxial or optical signal from the motherboard. There could be differences with latency, driver compatibility, etc... But as far as the actual audio quality goes, if it is bit perfect it's the same 1s and 0s you'd have with the STXs coaxial or the USB cable, thus the same "audio quality".

[dingostolemyipod]

what I am interested in knowing is if I run from the coaxial out of the STX to the Stagedac, is the STX still the audio quality base line?

This is something I am confused about too. My current understanding is that the coaxial on the STX is a bit perfect digital signal. It won't go through the DAC and output stage on the STX at all.
Same should be true if you ran the Stagedac off a coaxial or optical signal from the motherboard. There could be differences with latency, driver compatibility, etc... But as far as the actual audio quality goes, if it is bit perfect it's the same 1s and 0s you'd have with the STXs coaxial or the USB cable, thus the same "audio quality".

bit perfect only if you use ASIO or wasapi, but that's the same story for any DAC on a windows machine

[BusinessEvolution]

yeah digital out shouldn't have too many issues. The digital out of the ST is theoretically better than the STX, and both we tested to be better than the optical out on mobos. The interesting thing is that the new Phoebus card uses that same chip that mobos use for digital out. They also nerfed the release version, so its not as good for music as a STX. I was wondering if they were going to release a STX 2, but probably not seeing as how they nerfed the phoebus.

[flognuts]

what I am interested in knowing is if I run from the coaxial out of the STX to the Stagedac, is the STX still the audio quality base line?

This is something I am confused about too. My current understanding is that the coaxial on the STX is a bit perfect digital signal. It won't go through the DAC and output stage on the STX at all.
Same should be true if you ran the Stagedac off a coaxial or optical signal from the motherboard. There could be differences with latency, driver compatibility, etc... But as far as the actual audio quality goes, if it is bit perfect it's the same 1s and 0s you'd have with the STXs coaxial or the USB cable, thus the same "audio quality".

this is what I thought. Though people claim coax is the best......

[theeyealtering]

Yeah, a guy in a hifi store told me today that coax was best. Not sure why.

[flognuts]

probably to sell you a monster coax cable (rrp. $199)

[BusinessEvolution]

Yeah, a guy in a hifi store told me today that coax was best. Not sure why.

There are three/four standardish digital connects

USB: High bandwidth, though it has electrical issues, and if its on a shared bus there are link saturation issues. Can be better than other digital connections that don't have great clocks, can be worse especially on cheaper laptops.
synchronous: Prone to jitter, needs decent clock or jitter correction, bandwidth limited to 24/48khz ish.
asynchronous: Far less prone to jitter but less correctable if there is, heaps of bandwidth 24/192mhz+. Drivers and hardware can impact on sound greatly, usually jitter and noise.

S/PDIF
Coaxial: Has the higher bandwidth enough for 24/192mhz with ease, however has electrical issues, such as ground loops. $20-30 is the absolute limit of whats needed to be spent unless in high EM environment or a long run, keep cable below three meters if possible.
Optical: Doesn't have electrical issues, limited bandwidth 24/192mhz is the max usually better glass fiber cables can have double the bandwidth, prone to jitter (needs a good clock), needs a good cable, needs a good socket on both ends. In perfect situations, with great connectors on both pieces of equipment, and with high end glass toslink/optical cable, with a good clock either internal or an external unit. Optical surpasses coaxial with ease though at great/extreme expense. Cable quality has a huge impact;
Low end plastic<Monster<low end glass<high end plastic<high end glass. To beat coaxial you'd probably need to spend $100-200 (don't buy monster, it isn't that great especially for its price).
(single strand plastic<mutli strand quartz glass<multi strand plastic<single strand glass (from memory)). Monster gets a lower mark because its fancy connectors can cause problems.

AES Pro version of above, have slightly different connections, but not much advantage outside of recording and production.
XLR: theoretically slightly better than coaxial, I don't have much knowledge about this as I don't intend to use it ever.
Ethernet: Bandwidth advantages, error/jitter correction advantages, potential latency issues.
optical: same as above different electrical standard

[flognuts]

ok so USB or coax lol

edit. This is going to seem very head-fi-ish.

For the longest time I thought The dacmagic wasn't up to scratch, which is why I was looking to upgrade it. I though it had overly piercing highs, mainly with voices. After reading the post further up about the STX coax been the baseline I decided to delete the stx drivers and install the realtek motherboard drivers and use the optical out from that.

problem fixed, the dacmagic has never sounded this good, on my system atleast, The STX coax out has some kind of vile to that degraded the audio quality of the dacmagic.

Defiantly not a placebo, because this has been present ever since I used this set up and now its gone.

so make sure you test all digital outputs from your computer to see which is the best for your setup.