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RE: I have to disagree with you in part...

My Mytek has an internal jumper setting that reduces its output level by 6 dB. This is what I use to drive my Focal near field monitors. Also, the Mytek has an analog volume control that adds euphonic second harmonic distortion. The digital volume control does a much cleaner job of reducing the output level. Therefore, I bypass the analog volume control and the extra set of I.C. op-amps.

My Focal near field monitors were "hot, hot, hot" with many classic CDs totally unlistenable when driven by the Mytek or by a juli@ sound card. This is not the fault of the speakers, the DACs or the recordings. This was the fault of my room acoustics and system setup. The cure in the treble was fairly simple: put up some acoustic treatment on the walls that were causing early reflections and adjusting the tweeter controls on the Focal monitors to properly "voice" the system. I did this by listening to several dozen recordings, but if I had just picked one or two orchestral recordings on Reference Recordings I could have saved myself a lot of time.

Getting the problems I had in the bass resolved was much harder, it involved a lot more than twisting two "treble" controls until they were half-way down the scale. (Groveling around on the floor moving the sub woofer and twisting the cross-over controls was a PITA.) After spending several weeks trying to balance the bass by ear I gave up and got a calibrated microphone and real time analyzer before I was successful. In the bass, the best sound was found with as close to flat response as I could get, down to about 27 Hz which was as far as my sub would go. In the treble, it was necessary to roll off 10 kHz by about 3.5 dB, shelving after that, but I adjusted the highs solely by ear, unlike the bass.

From my experience I am completely happy with both my Mytek and my Focals, but I can understand that non-technical audiophiles might find both of these products less than satisfactory "out of the box". Both products were developed for the pro-audio marketplace where technical ability on the part of the consumers is assumed.I wouldn't call them "DIY" products because there was no need to use a 'scope or soldering iron, but they were far from "plug and play".

I have never used the Mytek at 44.1 kHz. I always upsample CDs to 176.4 or DSD128 using HQplayer before sending the result to the Mytek. The Mytek uses the standard SABRE chip upsampling filter and this is marginal at 44.1 kHz. This is no big deal in a computer audio system where there are many possible filters that can be used to do one's own bespoke upsampling. Of course, no amount of trickery is going to make 44/16 audio sound as good as 176/24 audio or DSD. The Mytek sounds best running at DSD128.

Tony Lauck

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


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