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Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: Thankfully the board in question comes with choice of...

It's a NOS DAC. I would never say anything good about a NOS DAC that runs at 44 kHz. These are a defective way of playing back digital audio and do not output the waveform that was originally captured in the digital signal.

The photos show a "perfect" square wave, which is not a correct analog signal that can be encoded in a digital format. This shows the presence of imaging distortion in playback. If you had a waveform for a sine wave at high frequency shown over multiple cycles you would see a wavy envelop caused by beating between the true signal and the image.

The "noise" floor is probably the analog noise floor of the DAC with a silent digital signal. There are no plots of sine waves at varies levels, as would show harmonic distortion, no jitter plots, etc... In addition, there are no plots that show whether (how much) the noise floor varies as a function of the input signals being played.

A proper spec sheet or measurement review would have considerably more information than the two plots on the link you provided. Take a look at any of the Stereophile measurements in DAC reviews for what is missing. It looks like the plots shown here were "cherry picked" to be the best possible ones.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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