Any Hegel H390 owners using Hegel D50 DAC?

@stuartk 

Listen Up customer here as well.  Good luck with the D50.  I hope it brings what you are looking for.  

How long have you had your H390?  FWIW - A'gon member Nutty sent me an SR Purple Fuse for the H390.  I honestly wanted no part of that stuff.  Some of the fuse threads here just seemed delusional to me.  Eventually, however, I tried it.  I can tell you, I was pleasantly surprised.  The change was immediate and positive.  I paid him for the fuse.  To my ear, it opened up the sound of the H390.  That was back in June 2023.  Haven't looked back.       

@ghosthouse a

Thanks.

I don’t recall, exactly. 5 years? 

I’ve never played with fuses. 

Right out of the box, the D50 was very smooth and tonally, pretty much identical to the H390’s internal DAC. Fairly quickly, the D50 became much brighter and  vocal sibilance is the worst I’ve heard. I’ll let it accumulate 100 hours and re-evaluate. 

At 100 hours, sibilance and brightness have subsided. This DAC is very smooth sounding. Detail, soundstage height, width and depth are all clearly better than the H390’s internal DAC. 

Having never heard an ESS DAC before, it took me awhile to digest and assess what I was hearing. Ultimately, I found it’s not my cup of tea. It’s as though the sound is "manicured" to such a degree that all the emotion has been lost in the process. For me, emotional engagement is the top priority and no degree of audiophile attributes can compensate for its absence. Perhaps this would sound more appealing to me if paired with tubes but I have no desire to go that route.

At this point, I’ve auditioned three DACs at the 4K to 6K price point (one was used -sells for 8K, new) and have preferred the H390’s DAC in every case. Perhaps it’s time to just stay with what I like and stop paying attention to Mr. FOMO. 

As I liked the Aqua (except for the fatigue) I decided to try two other r2r DACs: Mojo Mystique XSE and LTA Aero, because I could return both. To my great surprise, I preferred the DAC in the Hegel. This wholly unexpected outcome prompted me to ask myself what I was looking for. I realized what I really wanted was basically, "the same tonality, presentation, only better". I can list better resolution, better separation and deeper soundstaging as three specific attributes.

Where did the Mojo and LTA fall short?

@soix 

In contrast to the D50, it’s very difficult to describe in detail my experiences with the Mojo and LTA DACs. All I can say is, they simply sounded very bland. The music never came alive. I spoke with Benjamin Z. and he suspected a cabling issue, although he also said no one had ever reported such an experience to him. He very generously offered to include some cables if I wanted to try again (the unit I’d auditioned was used) but as I couldn’t afford to buy that DAC and new cables, I demurred.