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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: Sure: ultimately it what we like subjectively posted by Feanor on January 7, 2022 at 04:19:46:
Have you actually listened to a lot of different DACs? I have listened to some VERY high end DACs with nearly perfect measurements (by your standards, not mine) and they all sound very different. Not just a little bit.
Excellent measurements doesn't begin to tell you how they will sound. Some rather pedestrian measuring DACs sound better...almost all R2R DACs measure worse than the SOTA sigma/delta DACs; however, they clearly sound more "real" to a fairly large number of listeners. The output stage is also extremely important...probably than the rest of the DAC.
A 1:1 example of this was comparing my Ayon Skylla 2 DAC against an Ayon Stratos DAC. The analog tube output stage is EXACTLY the same (as is the power supply, which is also tube rectified and choke filtered). The main difference between these DACs is the digital engine. My Skylla uses the classic BB PCM1704K DAC chips (2 per channel) and a classic 8x oversampling digital filter. The Stratos uses an ESS Sabre DAC (I think 2 per channel as well) with complex filters (2 choices) and upsampling to 24/192(defeatable).
Comparing the two at my place was very interesting. With the upsampling engaged they sounded quite different with the STratos sounding less solid and sharper sounding. Turning that off and selecting the less aggressive filter the sound between the two DACs converged significantly to where they sounded quite close. However, all three of us (the Stratos owner and another friend) felt that the DAC tech shown through with the Skylla sounding more solid and grounded and the STratos a bit more ethereal. But the sound was harmonically rich in a very natural way with extremely high resolution at the same time.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Sure: ultimately it what we like subjectively - morricab 01/11/2205:25:08 01/11/22 (0)
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