Quality of DAC's in equipment

Last weekend I was having a fiddle round the back of my rack and tried connecting my CD player (Myryad MCD500) digitally to my amp (Denon AVR3300) as recommended by many commentators. The resulting sound was not as good as that I get when using the DAC in the CD and the analogue output so I've gone back to that. Is this a sign of the quality of the DAC's in the CD player and hence why the player is the price it was?

Regards

Chris

 

I also have the 3300 and have experimented with my arcam cd player. I think most people who recommend using the amp's internal DACs are referring to cheap DVD players used as CD players. When it comes to stand alone CD players I'm sure most would agree on 2 things: They are much better in stereo than equivalent priced DVD players and only high end receivers or processors would have DACs that are better than those in half decent CD players.

 

I have a Primare D20 CD player and a Denon 3802 amp (I use a Primare A30.1 for strict hi-fi use).

The digital out from the CD player to the 3802 sounds pretty c**p compared to the analogue out. Very painful on the ears. The 3802 is great for DD / DTS decoding though.

Dave48

 

I have an ancient (12 yrs) Marantz CD50SE player and the analogue output from that sounded way better than putting it digitally through my Marantz SR4200 receiver.

Two weeks ago I got a TAG DAC 20 and now use that instead. The sound from it is outstanding , by far the best sound my system has ever made.

Only really high end AV receivers (eg TAG AVR32) have very high quality DACs (TAG say the DACs in the AVR32 are better than in the DAC20).

Michael.