da can without a doubt color the sound, why do u think pro engineers pay thousands of dollars for ultra high quality DA?
Better quality components, higher S/N ratio, better aliasing filters etc etc.
if adc can color a sound so can a dac .. it just common sense.. heres is a theory .. how do you know its not the da in an sp12 that makes the sound so crunchy? .. truthfully there is no way to know because u cannot internally grab an sp sound beofre it hits the da (no digital outs)
o rly? Ever heard of saving a file and loading it somewhere else or transferring it with midi or smdi? What i said before was actually pretty well within the framework of common sense, but w/e. Going from digital to digital, no matter how its done, recording or copying, will result in an exact 1 on 1 copy.
And an SP12 doesnt have an ADC, it uses the DAC to sample via succcesive approximation, and anti-alias filters the input. So again, if you have a sample from another source and load it in it will be an exact replica. Maybe it sounds a bit crunchier then too, i dunno, but still not the same way as if you had sampled it in the SP12 itself. All DACs/ADCs aren't built alike =].
All das are not built alike .. an ipod has a DA and ill be damned if i can get as much detail on that as i could with a benchmark dac-1 or something. take a real listen to a high end DA and tell me there is not a diffrence. the diffrence is big. the first time i did it i heard things in my mixes that i just simply didnt hear before.
I never said sound never gets colored in any kind of way on its way out, i just said its a different coloring. An sblive or your mp3 player or w/e sounds shitty because it has cheap shitty components all throughout its chain, so by the time it comes out it has an insane noise floor, and they also dont have good aliasing filters. So depending on how you use it, yes you will get artifacts in your sound aka coloring on its way out. Im fully aware of the quality differences in different DACs. Those high quality D/As arent surrounded by all kinds of RF sensitive components or noisy ass pc fans and electromagnetic field and/or noise (HDs for example) producing devices, they have excellent aliasing filters, they have excellent clocks to help eliminate jitter, etc etc. If you take a random DAC off some cheap ass soundcard, desolder it, and make a new circuit board using superioir components all around the DAC and then put it in an external case you can also get a high quality D/A (will also probably cost you a bit too). This still doenst mean all DACs are alike, im just saying that in the conversion process the surrounding components make a huge difference, maybe even more so than the little DAC chip itself.
Here is a wikipedia article to explain why shit gets colored in the analog to digital process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_noise
and an appropriate snippet from it:
Quantization noise is a model of quantization error introduced by quantization in the analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) process in telecommunication systems and signal processing. It is a rounding error between the analogue input voltage to the ADC and the output digitized value. The noise is non-linear and signal-dependent.
Thats why in a DAC, you dont get these kind of artifacts in your sound because it doesnt have to try to round out shit since its already in a digital form. It only has to read them and send it out, thus its dependent on the surrounding components to deliver it at a high quality.
Id rather go back to talking about how to get awesome kicks though, i could really use some help in that area.