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Low cost giant killer DAC stories


Guest dr_carl

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Guest dr_carl

Here's mine.

 

I bought a Bluesound Node 2 and lived with the on-board DAC for 6 months.

 

Then I pull my old Musical Fidelity V90 DAC (RRP $400) out, connect the Node via optical. Not a huge difference.

 

Ok, methinks, try something better. I look at ASR find a low cost option and order a SMSL Sanskrit 10 V2 for $180 AUD. Being 2020 it takes a while to show. Meanwhile a Hegel (RRP more than that by a long way) DAC comes up here, so I grabbed it.

 

Substantial difference to both Node and V90. Nice.

 

Two weeks later the SMSL turns up. Ok let's hear it. Excellent! 

Let it burn in two weeks. Put the Hegel back in. Nice. Put the SMSL back, better.

 

Looks like I'll sell the Hegel, and wait for my pennies to add up to some tubes...

 

It's an anecdote. That's all.

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I have a 10+ year old Musiland MD-10 that never disappoints.

I purchased it initially as an outboard sound card to sit between a laptop and powered PA speakers for DJ work.

(The analogue outputs on many PCs, especially laptops, is often quite noisy.)

Was probably overkill for that task, but it was 2nd hand, so the price was right. 

Sounded great and its built-in level control came in handy at times.

 

I've since found lots of other uses for it.  It was my headphone amp at work for a while driving a pair of Yamaha YH-2 Orthodynamics, and currently resides in my 2nd system between a TV, DVD Player, etc and a vintage Pioneer A-447 integrated.

 

It uses PCM2704 & CS4398 chips and a linear PSU.  I had the cover off as soon as it arrived of course, and found the build and component quality very impressive with the power supply in it's own isolated section.

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2 hours ago, dr_carl said:

Let it burn in two weeks. Put the Hegel back in. Nice. Put the SMSL back, better.

 

Looks like I'll sell the Hegel, and wait for my pennies to add up to some tubes...

 

It's an anecdote. That's all.

It's an important anecdote though since it would be easy to fall for the power of suggestion making people think the more expensive one must be sounding better. Digital has jumped leaps and bounds in the last decade, and you're reaping the benefits of it for sure.  Progress till 2010 was slow and not always forward... You can thank the chipmakers for turning that around. The performance of commodity chips is insanely good now, and the other revolution was ESS/Sabre admitting in 2011 that existing digital volume controls sucked due to braindead truncation. They moved it to 32bit processing (before oversampling) and it's hard for analogue to compete now.

Edited by Ittaku
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Guest dr_carl

One aspect of my interaction (I won't call it an experiment) not predicted was the power supply issue, where I estimated that the Hegel, would give better result on the basis of transformers vs op amps. Seems like bias on my part. On paper one might view the SMSL as inferior in quality of the parts that go into the power supply. It certainly was a first for me to use a phone charger. Great result. 

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