Absolute top tier DAC for standard res Redbook CD

The Totaldac Twelve is not cheap to make, no matter where he is located... 600 .01% foil resistors, at $20 a piece retail, it is easy to see where the bulk of the costs are. Add to that SOTA Parts, inputs, outputs, power supplies, cases, boards.... It is a luxury item, no getting around that, and it is built to be. That is why he offers several more affordable DAC's that still beat out anything at their respective prices, IMO.

08-14-15: Paul79
The Totaldac Twelve is not cheap to make, no matter where he is located... 600 .01% foil resistors, at $20 a piece retail, it is easy to see where the bulk of the costs are. Add to that SOTA Parts, inputs, outputs, power supplies, cases, boards.... It is a luxury item, no getting around that, and it is built to be. That is why he offers several more affordable DAC's that still beat out anything at their respective prices, IMO.

Agreed Paul. I looked closely at Totaldac (along with CAD) before going with Lampizator. His stuff is labor intensive and expensive to make. Most dac makers use off the shelf parts made in China and still manage to charge an obscene amount. I use his USB cable which is great. Vincent is a MIT-level engineer and the real deal. I am glad you are grooving on his products.

08-14-15: Paul79
The Totaldac Twelve is not cheap to make, no matter where he is located... 600 .01% foil resistors, at $20 a piece retail, it is easy to see where the bulk of the costs are. Add to that SOTA Parts, inputs, outputs, power supplies, cases, boards....

No question about it. And I would add that I wouldn't be surprised if in addition he has to go through a process of screening the resistors further, selecting some and rejecting others. While 0.01% is an exceptionally tight tolerance for a resistor, it does not even come close to supporting 24 bit performance in a ladder configuration. Presumably TotalDAC's use of 6 ladders per channel in the Twelve helps considerably, but consider that 24 bits corresponds to 2^24 = 16,777,216 possible states, which in turn means that the least significant of the 24 bits controls 1/(16,777,216 - 1) = 0.000006%(!) of the full scale (maximum) output of the DAC.

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, providing anything close to 24 bit performance via a ladder approach, as TotalDAC and MSB Technology apparently do, is an amazing (and invariably expensive) achievement.

Regards,
-- Al

08-14-15: Almarg
No question about it. And I would add that I wouldn't be surprised if in addition he has to go through a process of screening the resistors further, selecting some and rejecting others. While 0.01% is an exceptionally tight tolerance for a resistor, it does not even come close to supporting 24 bit performance in a ladder configuration. Presumably TotalDAC's use of 6 ladders per channel in the Twelve helps considerably, but consider that 24 bits corresponds to 2^24 = 16,777,216 possible states, which in turn means that the least significant of the 24 bits controls 1/(16,777,216 - 1) = 0.000006%(!) of the full scale (maximum) output of the DAC.

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, providing anything close to 24 bit performance via a ladder approach, as TotalDAC and MSB Technology apparently do, is an amazing (and invariably expensive) achievement.

Regards,
-- Al

Agreed Al. That is crazy, and I think Vincent goes into detail about the process he goes through in selection....kudos for his painstaking efforts....

Both CAD and TotalDac are on my list of 'really want to hear'. There is a rumor that CAD will be relocating from England to Washington state. Cool.

Also want to hear the Berkely reference (although it's still pointless because it doesn't have a usb input) and the Aesthetix Romulus Sig. Plus the new MSB V.

Just need to narrow down speaker choice.