I recently bought a new whizz bang HD TV and decided to connect it up to my Hi-Fi system to hear the sound better. Also, I had had the Blu-ray player connected up to my amplifier using RCA analogue cables. I had the idea to simplify matters by using the TV as a communication hub to pass through the digital signals from the various boxes to my CD player using a Toslink cable. The trouble is my Hi-Fi is situated rather a long way from the TV and the Blu-ray player. I could not get a reliable digital signal from my TV to the CD player. In the end, I solved the problem by connecting a short Toslink cable from my TV to a USB DAC/amplifier and running analogue RCA cables directly to my amplifier. In this way I could hear BBC 3 Radio from a terrestrial source being reproduced fairly well. My wife could also hear continental channels from a satellite source in almost Hi-Fi quality as well. Radio over the TV is broadcast in MP3 at 192 kbps.
For my Blu-ray player, I wanted better performance for playing opera films etc. I ended up connecting up the player directly to my CD DAC using a 5m Toslink cable - this worked perfectly.
I did lots of tests of the sound quality by playing CD quality and 256 Kbps MP3 music files through the various DACs and amplifiers. I concluded that modern DACs and Amplifiers seemed to sound the same - to my ears anyway. I also concluded that if I was to take a double blind test to distinguish between 256 kbps MP3 and CD then I would probably fail to determine which was which other than by chance. To me a big difference between the quality of the sound from various sources could only be perceived when the volume changed. This is a well known phenomenon. I get the feeling that many people including journalists from Hi-Fi magazines can easily get fooled by the Fletcher-Munson curve. The volume of a sound affects the frequency response of the ears. You could easily be fooled into believing that one cable sounds better than another etc. if you do not do your listening tests at equalised volumes.
http://ehomerecordingstudio.com/fletcher-munson-curve/
After all the playing around with digital cables etc. I got a pleasant surprise; a friend of mine gave me some Beatles Mono LPs which were bought soon after they were released in the sixties. We had some friends around for lunch and compared them to the newly re-mastered Beatles mono albums. All of the old records were in very good condition and they sounded almost exactly the same as their modern equivalents. There was no arguing or Hi-Fi hype or snobbishness: we all immediately came to the same conclusion without discussion. I did, however, have to adjust the volume as some of the modern re-masters seemed quieter. The good old Fletcher-Munson curve came into play again, but none of us was fooled that new or old sounded better.
