AudioCircle
Industry Circles => NuPrime Audio => Topic started by: 27Kcd on 20 Feb 2020, 05:25 am
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Better pre amp - IDA-16 or Dac-10?
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I am deciding to go: more (+cables) or less boxes. I see the new AMG PRA which looks promising. I would need a stand alone DAC + amp. Integrated amps have all I should need without a full rack of components...+ $$$ cables. I hope the NuPrime IDA-16 will work for me, why would current owners want to upgrade? -Thanks
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Spend some time reading the guides, starting with the Amp comparison guide. People generally upgrade for performance or customisation reasons. I think ultimately the difference is whether you just want to enjoy very good sound for your music or treat this as a hobby. Some people have several sets of speakers and electronics components and switch them around depending on music or rooms.
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Thanks for the reply.
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I was just inquiring on the sonic difference between an op amp and discrete pre amp design.
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I was just inquiring on the sonic difference between an op amp and discrete pre amp design.
OpAmp is made up of transistors packaged in an enclosure. Basically a chip vendor designs an OpAmp for one class of applications. Other vendors might provide the same specification OpAmp but with higher performance. You will find some audiophiles changing OpAmp (generally we don't recommend that) to get better performance or different sound.
So instead of using off-the-shelf OpAmp, highly skilled and EXPERIENCE engineer can build the same function out of discrete transistors. Now this gets interesting and this is where unlimited customization is possible. To have an electronic engineer that understand high-end audio is extremely rare, to get one that also knows how to design at the transistor level is nearly impossible. We are fortunately to have our.
We can't say that one approach is definitely better than the other, it all depends on the performance of that particular design around the opamp or discrete transistors.