upgradeable dacs

Empirical Audio Overdrive SE can be upgraded: USB interface, Master Clock for USB interface, Coupling Capacitors, separate power supply chassis and 13 internal regulators. It has already seen all of these upgraded over the last 2-3 years. Since it can drive amps directly, a transformer buffer stage is available to add-in other analog sources as well as bal-SE and SE-bal conversions.

Overdrive has been in reviewer and customer shootouts with all of the DACs mentioned, as well as Debussey, Weiss 202, PD MPD5, Emm Labs, Ayre, PWD, Metrum Hex and others.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

"What formats are we talking about here? If its just redbook, I'm not sure how much more designers are going to get out of it. Its a pretty mature format."

You would be surprised. I personally used to upsample all 44.1 tracks to 24/96 because the DACs I was using sounded better. I either did it with Foobar on-the-fly or later with R8Brain and Wave Editor in batch style.

Now that I have eliminated the nasties of digital filtering and minimized jitter, I have no motivation to upsample anymore. It actually sounds better 44.1. The trick is to minimize the effects of digital filtering.

These are recent advancements, so there is still a LOT of gas left in redbook IMO.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

ZD542 - There are some excellent examples at all price points. Here are a few:

Chord Qute
AMR DP777
Combination of Off-Ramp 5 feeding Wyred 4 Sound DAC2 with I2S
Overdrive SE
Teac UD501
Mytek Stereo192

Steve N.
Empirical Audio