The internal DAC of Sprout100

Audio Components
1

I’m thinking of buying a Sprout100 as first step to upgrade my stereo system. However, I’ve got two questions that are nagging in my brain:

Paul mentions in some of his YouTube video’s that the PSaudio DirectStream DAC first converts the digital signal to DSD, and than converts that DSD signal to analog audio. I understand that you would want to do that because the conversion from DSD to analog is relatively simple (just a low pass filter) and therefore good sounding. My question is: does the internal DAC of the Sprout100 do it the same way?

Is there an affordable (lowish budget) solution to play the DSD layer from SACD disks through the USB post on the Sprout100?

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It does not and I do not know of a more affordable way of doing that. That said, Sprout’s internal DAC sounds quite good!

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3

Thanks for answering my DAC question Paul!

Regarding my SACDs, I guess that for the time being I’ll have to settle for playing back the CD layer :slight_smile:

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Or. . . get an SACD player. There are some used cheap ones out there. The analog out of one of those should sound pretty good going into the Sprout playing back SACDs.

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That will certainly be worth trying. I just didn’t see it as an option because I’ve read so many times that the internal DACs of cheap CD and DVD/Bluray players really are not very good…

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First SACD player I got was this Onkyo C-S5VL. Works and sounds great. Plenty on the used market. Play your SACDs through the analog outputs. And for CDs, you can use the optical or coax output and compare the Sprout’s DAC with the Onkyo’s internal DAC.

onkyo_c-s5vl_super_audio_cd_player
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7

Well who said you had to go cheap? :slight_smile: SACD playback can be better than the Redbook playback in a player.