@kirkwallace that Gato looks amazing! I want one but I have no practical use for it (ATM)
Maybe it IS all in the DAC chips
I’ve often pushed back against the idea of purchasing any piece of audio gear based on the parts contained, especially DAC’s. While the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) itself is the key component, so much goes into making a good sounding product, like stream buffers/jittter removal, power supplies and analog output stage that I thought this could lead buyers astray.
Still, having done that, and still thinking that I correctly warned others to avoid buying just on DAC brands alone, I have found myself after many years, returning again to vintage Burr Brown based DACs and home theater processors.
Color me changed with experience.
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@macg19 are you familiar with the Italian idiom “l’appetito vien mangiado”? (something like “appetite comes in the eating”) In our audio hobby, i think it applies too. You will find a use for a sonically and visually delicious component. |
@kirkwallace I am not, but familiar with the experience and heading back to Italy for more mangiado in September! |
I am envious @macg19 ! September is always a good time to visit! (Well not early September, perhaps in some areas….) |
When CDs first came out, Philips players had a reputation for better sound quality than their competitors. I think the reason was that Philips used four-times oversampling, so they could use a much gentler analogue filter than the ’brick-wall’ filters used by others, to remove digital artefacts. On the other hand, Philips discarded the two least significant bits so their players had at most a 14-bit depth. They did this because they could not laser-trim resistors accurately enough to get reasonable monotonicity with more bits. (In the following, I try to use lower-case dac to indicate a chip-set, and DAC for a separate box containing one or more dacs. Everywhere, actually When Sony and Philips introduced SACD, which uses a one-bit DSD format, they expected DSD to prevail but failed to market properly, especially in North America. DSD is a natural extension of sigma-delta dac architectures, but completely at odds with ladder dacs including R2R. So some modern dacs can easily handle DSD and PCM formats natively, while others can’t. I’d put ESS and AKM in the native category, and current Burr Brown in the can’t category. This came to a head for me when my Marantz universal disk player started to fail, and I bought an unknown (to me) player from Reavon. The Reavon is very similar to the Oppo 105 but includes two Burr Brown dacs, a PCM-1690 for 8-channel unbalanced playback and a PCM-1795 for stereo (2 channel) balanced playback. When I got it home, I was very happy with CD playback through XLR connections, but could almost instantly tell SACD playback was missing a lot. It turns out that multi-channel SACD was being converted to CD quality before being fed to the dac. Even more disappointing, two-channel SACD was also down converted to CD quality before being fed to the 2-channel dac. Send digital over HDMI to my Marantz preprocessor and the sound is stunning. But then, the Marantz has eight 2-channel AKM dacs that can natively process DSD and do a brilliant job on PCM, including Dolby Atmos. So yes, dacs do matter, how you feed them also matters and what you feed them matters even more. |
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