Hello!

I am planning on buying a turntable + new audio setup for Christmas, yeah! Starting from zero.

There are a lot of tutorials and resources out there, but I would love a confirmation to see if I am understanding the full general audio workflow correctly, from the source to the speakers.

Analog would be:

  • Turntable > phono preamp (normalizing the low signal from the tt) > preamp (volume control and other fun stuff) > speakers amp (boosting the signal for the speakers) > speakers

Is that correct ?

And digital would be:

  • Digital source (e.g. PC) > DAC (digital to analog signal) > preamp > speakers amp > speakers

Correct ?

Any setup with less products than these stages means some of these stages are combined into one product, e.g. powered speakers are combining amp+speakers. Correct ?

I am a bit confused about “receivers” and what stages they are handling exactly. I guess it depends and some are combining more parts than others ? When does a product starts to be named “receiver” ? Also I understand some can handle HDMI for example, for multimedia uses.

Last question: starting from scratch, does it make sense to want to find one product per stage, for the fun of understanding all of that and having a cool setup ?

Thanks in advance for the enlightenment!

  • MellowTones@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    A “receiver” is an integrated amp (so pre-amp plus power-amp, which you seem to be thinking of as “speakers amp”, all in the one box) that includes a radio tuner (i.e. it receives radio signals). Not sure there’s much use for them any more, given you can get radio channels in apps/programs on a mobile, tablet, PC etc and feed them in via a DAC. Thinking of which, some active/powered speakers include the DAC stage too, while some don’t…