Quote Originally Posted by topspeed
Thanks Wooch,

Let me run an idea by you. Currently, my Dish STB is hooked-up analog via rca to my receiver. When I upgrade to a HD box at the end of the year, I plan on using a digital link. Do you think the Burr-Brown DAC's in the Denon will help (I really like what they do to CD playback in PureDirect mode) or is the data stream from Dish/Sirius already too compromised and/or compressed?
I'm targeting the same upgrade at the end of the year. I have no idea whether or not it will help. It would think that it depends on how clean the signal is at each step along the way -- from the broadcast playback, to the satellite signal, to how the satellite receiver outputs the digital signal. My guess would be that at some point along that chain, it passes through some sort of signal alteration. Whether that be playing compressed files off a music server at the broadcast end (like a lot of radio stations do), downsampling the PCM bitstream before uplinking to the satellite, or using some kind of lossy compression at any other step, I doubt that what gets output through the satellite output will be the same 44.1/16 PCM signal as the original CD in the studio. But, even with all that, it certainly won't hurt to run the digital signal through a decent DAC. Ironically, some of the harsher recordings in my collection sound smoother when I hear them on the Directv music channels.