Instruments • Re: Roland Cloud

Another question is how much DAC on JP contributed to the sound...

None. By the time the mid 90s rolled around Roland was using off the shelf DACs they could buy in the cheap

If you look in th service manual you will see the DAC was a upd63200gs-e2

That was a very very common DAC that was used in many DVD and CD players, it had no impact on the sound and was transparent

You can still buy them today for a few dollars

In the 1980s DACs were not used in inexpensive consumer electronics and many of them were low powered bespoke designs that would color the sound

By the mid 1990s with the rise of low cost CD and DVD players that was no longer the case

Depends on how critically you want to listen to things but if you do listen critically, the DAC does matter. Especially anything before the turn of the millennium and if it was cheap, WILL have an impact. Sure, does it make a big enough difference to really matter in the context of music? Probably not.

Ever since the mid 1990s you can't hear or perceive a difference in consumer level DACs, even you admit it doesn't matter

I deal in real world music production, if I have to look at things on a scope to tell a difference there is no difference

There certainly is no magic or mojo in consumer level DACs and hasn't even for decades

Nobody said there is magic or mojo as far as I can tell, but there _is_ a difference, albeit a relatively subtle one at that depending on your point of view and how critically you want to sit down and listen to it.

Have you actually sat down and compared converters ever?

Try this: Run any piece of music through your soundcard then back into the inputs.. then do this like 3 times and insert a simple non-linear plugin afterwards (could be a compressor, saturation, limiter.. whatever as long as it's non-linear), then listen to the results. Now I assume you have a post-millennium soundcard which is probably 100 times better technically than any 90's consumer DAC. Do this test and tell me the output of the original test signal is identical and impossible to hear compared to the loopback.

The point was this, in case you missed it:

Emulating the DAC in the context of a JP-8000 would make a difference compared to just the straight digital output of the synth algorithm itself. Would it be a big enough difference to matter for most people? Probably not, but it would be a difference, one that can be heard in an ABX test.. aka not placebo. And as mentioned before, the difference only grows larger once you start processing the end result.

Statistics: Posted by bmanic — Fri Sep 13, 2024 10:57 pm

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