What does sound quality depend on ?

[Trouble_Kid]

The quality of your Soundcard OR
The quality of your Speakers OR

BOTH?

[Killing time]

sound quality is only going to be as good as the weakest link in your signal chain.

[Trouble_Kid]

sound quality is only going to be as good as the weakest link in your signal chain.

So this can be anything from the quality of the audio file to the quality of the mixer sound-card to the quality of the speakers. Right.

Anything else ?

[DJAdeSands]

Right, Audio file, cables, hardware, pretty much anything that produces or carries the sound.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[Daniboy]

Don't bother too much about it, just try to read about how to improve sound quality of all those things mentioned above and do what is simple and reasonable. People almost won't hear the difference, trust me.

[Deejaesnafu]

if the sound quality of file you are playing is low, it wont matter how good anything else in the chain is, its going to sound like crap. start with high quality song files, then address everything else. it wont matter if you are playing on a funktion one rig, if youre playing 92kpbs files of tape to tape recordings of a radio show..youre gonna have a bad time

[Monkey Mouse]

sound quality is only going to be as good as the weakest link in your signal chain.

Absolutely true.

But there is also no limit on how good sound quality can be - and getting close to "optimal" can cost a fortune. For example, you can pick up a quality 2 channel USB audio interface for $150 - and get pretty darn good quality. You can also get a 2 channel A to D converter that costs $13k - probably anyone would notice the difference in audio quality, few would pay 100x more for it.

[deevey]

#1 The quality of the Source

Then:
The quality of your Soundcard
The quality of your Power Supply
The quality of your Speakers
The quality of the interconnects
The quality of the ears of the listener

Don't bother too much about it, just try to read about how to improve sound quality of all those things mentioned above and do what is simple and reasonable. People almost won't hear the difference, trust me.

But this 100% .. I'd say most people on a night out are incapable of deciding if something sounds like crap so long as its loud or something they like hearing anyhow. (and I have seen a DJ get away with an entire set of 96kbps internet bootlegs during the iMesh days...full bar, everyone danced and the only person that could tell it sounded like crap was me!)

[Timbo21]

In my time I heard some pretty horrendous sound systems; completely distorted and overdriven. When you play on something like that, nothing will make a difference.

I don't know what it's like now, but the Ministry of Sound when it opened was just amazing, and I think the first club to really care about sound quality. So, on a system like that cartridges, quality of vinyl, turntables, mixer, amps, speakers etc, etc. will all make a difference.

There are often arguments on whether the difference can be heard between 320kbps and lossless WAV/AIFF, but on a good system 92kbps will clearly sound worse than WAV/AIFF.

During my time in studios I did a lot of demoing of analogue to digital and digital to analogue converters, often costing £4k. I must say I am blown away at the quality of the Native Instruments A10 I have; really amazing for the money, and really good sounding phono stage for vinyl.

I remember playing on a UREI mixer and when I listened back to the recording of the night I was blown away at how much better it sounded than my Vestax.

[SirReal]

You people have left out one very big thing when considering clean sound. Don't over drive your inputs on the mixer and don't clip the outputs. I don't care how good the rest of everything is, if you're clipping your audio it WILL sound like crap regardless of how much you spent on speakers amps and wav files.