shuvc said:
Please try to provide your responses based on the indicative equipment mentioned above and not in general terms of 'CD-Players are better than DVD Players' etc.
Shall try my level best, Oh Master !!!



shuvc said:
# A 30-40K AV Receiver is used for amplification. So say we are talking of a Denon 1909/Onkyo 606/Marantz 4002.
I have heard the Denon 1909, the Onkyo 606 and the Yamaha equivalent 663. I think in all these what finally mattered were the speakers.
The Denon I heard with Polk monitors 40 and then the Polk Monitors 60. The Denon really opened up with the 60s, and sounded a little tight with the 40s. I have heard the Onkyo 606 with Wharfedalle 9.6s, and it was certainly quite musical though a little bright for Hindi film songs. But this is a problem I have faced even with system costing a few lakhs. In my mind the best combination of these three would have been the Yamaha 663 combined with Epos M12i. I listened a few tracks of Fleetwood Mac, and they sounded very nice to me. Now the price of the Epos is more than that of the AVR!!
Again in all three cases, only a DVD Player was used. I am sure if a CD Player were used, all these AVRs will give good performance for music.
shuvc said:
# DVD Player is connected to the AVR through a digital coax or optical cable. Hence we are using the DAC on the AVR.
On my system consisting of the Onkyo 875 and the Wharfedale 9.5s, I switched rapidly between the two connections. I use a VDH Optocoupler MKII for optical, and a Tara Labs Prism 300s for digital coaxial. For the same tracks, frankly I could not make out any difference. I have been saying this quite often, but for short lengths, there is no difference between the two connections as long as you use good quality cables. In my comparison there could have been a very very small bit improvement in the presence and low frequencies (drums were a bit tighter) with the optical cable, but I would say this was because of the superior quality of the VDH cable. But you needed to focus like hell, and play the same tracks some umpteen times to hear the difference. Maybe it was all imaginary and in my mind. For pratical purposes, given the same DVD Player, and AVR, using the AVR's DAC, and using good quality cables, you will not hear any difference between the optical and coaxial cables.
shuvc said:
# CD Player is connected to the AVR using analog cables, thus using it's native DAC?
This is very general question, and cannot be answered so easily. For example if you use a receiver such as a Denon 1909, it will have much better DAC than most entry level CD Players such as the CA 340C, 540C or NAD's 315BEE. But the minute you step into the level of a NAD 542 CD Player of the CA 640C, you are stepping into the realms of specialised DACs such as Burr-Brown Sigma-Delta 24 bit Digital to Analogue Converter. With circuitry focused for two channels, and the capacity for multiple reads, these CD players can eliminate jitter much better than any external device. The CA 640C, for example, uses two Wolfson WM8740 24-bit/192kHz DACs, one for each channel.
Cheers