Delta-Sigma Alternatives

I somewhat agree with you on bass. It sounds like there is another layer of something added on top of mid-bass. It sounds a little bit denser and thicker than it needs to.
It is not distracting me much, I think Yggdrasil still does very nicely with kickdrums, but.. I do like my diy Soekris better for acoustic percussion.

What I can not say is that a S-D dac that I have heard does anything better than Yggdrasil. My exposure is much more limited though, I have not hear the likes of Bricasti and Hilo. Best S-D dac I think I know was BMC Puredac (supposedly close in performance to NAD M51) and I think compared to mediocre R-2Rs it's still garbage. This doesn't mean I couldn't like a S-D dac. I simply have lost faith.

When compared to sources with more even 3-D capability (TT or SFD-1 or Soekris) I agree, it's a bit off spatially. It somewhat lacks forward and backwards projection to me. But at the same time Yggdrasil draws the most precise contours to images in 3-D space I have heard. The relations in space are also a bit different. Images in soundscape are larger and more illuminated.

Then again AKM4490, Sabre and AD1955 based dacs sound practically 2-D to my ears. Even Metrum Quad with tosilink from MacBook sounded more realistic wrt soundstage geometry, although imaging was obviously very poor.

I personally do not want to compromise dynamics, timber, low level information and soundstage for sources. Here R-2R and multibit dacs have been much better to my ears. That is why I called you out on this.
Thanks for replying with your own pov.

 

I recently got a ps audio gain cell dac which is a sabre ES9010k2m, I guess it's an update to their previous nuwave dsd dac.. and I haven't noticed any downgrade compared to my soekris.. mainly using hd800 to compare.. I was kind of surprised since I fully bought in to the r2r messiah stuff

 

How is the Soekris in your chain connected. Do you use unbuffered outputs and which filters?

 

no I use the buffered outputs with xlr. I have a filterpack with soren's stock filter and some of pauls filters.. I prefer soren's stock filter but I can barely hear a difference, I guess I'm deaf

 

Benchmark makes good stuff too, it´s just that their openly objectivist philosophy gets them a lot of vocal opposition from the traditional audiophile crowd. The DAC1 was never a bad DAC... Sure it´s nothing special via USB, but to be fair USB was in a really bad state when its specifications were finalized. That issue was fixed with the DAC2 series which uses an XMOS chip for USB (one of the best on the market in my experience).

There are a lot of bright and edgy sounding D/S DACs out there, but Benchmark never belonged in that group. Their sound signature doesn´t editorialize anything, simply sounds "correct" for the most part. The treble is very extended, but it isn´t harsh or "digital sounding". The built in headphone amplifiers are quite good as well, especially considering how cheap they are.

Small edit: just adding that in my experience the Sabre based DAC3 (and via that I would guess DAC2 as well) doesn´t suffer from "Sabre glare" either. Personally I don´t think that phenomenon is something inherent to the Sabre chip itself - it´s more of an implementation thing. The Sabre based Oppo HA-1 for example on the other hand does have it.

 

I advise you to try the unbuffered outputs to a high impedance load (most tube amps) and use Paul's latest filter pack.
Soren's filters suck.
It's quite literally day and night difference to me and only reason this dac deserves place on my rack.

 

How does the Emotiva DC1 sound compared to Modi Multibit or Bifrost Uber? It's quite cheap compared to the other DS alternatives, which are mostly above 2k.

 

Thread could not be found...

 

maybe he meant this thread?
http://www.superbestaudiofriends.or...-effin-ringing-and-shit-like-that.2627/page-5