Modi Multibit: Multibit for the masses.

If you are willing to spend $400 to improve the sound of a $250 dac, well, all I can say is you are a better man (and a wealthier one) than I, Gunga Din. Hope it works out for you. Might I suggest listening first (although I can hear the distant sound of expectation bias crashing against the rocks of objectivity already)? Happy listening.

 

Good question, I meant to say something about this! I compared:

GOV2+ -> bal -> PM3
vs
GOV2+ -> SE -> Jotunheim -> bal -> PM3

and found I actually preferred the former. Much better soundstage, and better tonality as well. GOV2+ into Jotunheim was cleaner and had an iron grip on the drivers but sounded recessed in the lower mids and papery/phasey up top. Maybe if I had the cables to run the GO balanced into the Jotunheim this would change. In any case, my impressions above were Modibit -> Jotun vs GOV2+ direct.

Put it this way - though I'll probably pick up a Modibit soon, I don't want to use the DX50 as an input long-term (too much dicking around with microSD cards). If you read around a bit you will find a common suggestion in regard to USB->SPDIF is: wait a couple of months. That is my plan.

 

Why go SE from the GOV2+ to the Joti? Lack of balanced cables?

 

Yep, I have nothing that will do TRRS -> 3-pin XLR.

 

My thought on that was that USB/SPDIF converter could be used no matter what DAC I had. It isn't so much just for the Modi Multibit but for anything else I might be doing down the road that might have USB. I eventually will upgrade to a fully balanced DAC and Amp (maybe Gummy and Mjolnir 2?) and the Singxer SU-1 will still be useful to me then unless a better product hits the market at a lower price point (which has been heavily hinted at here and elsewhere).

 

That is how I looked at the USB DDC. Get a decent performing XMOS DDC with a well written driver for a stable, consistent, low jitter SPDIF output from a laptop. For desktop PCs the Lynx or RME PCIE cards are the way to go. Once setup for SPDIF one doesn't have to fiddle with all the other USB issues that plague a plethora of USB drivers, receivers, etc. as one experiments with other DACs. If budget were the only criteria then even a Breeze Audio DU-U8 could be a useful way to get SPDIF out of a laptop.

 

Looks like an interesting little unit. Too bad they used the wrong DSD logo.

 

That's brain-dead hilarious. But not only this... Apparently comes complete with "sealed cattle":

 

I have wondered why companies don't always hire native language proof readers. Seems like it would be inexpensive.

 

Maybe they do... they just hire the cheapest ones and that's what you get.

 

Judging by John Franks' language proficiency at Chord that may very well be...

 

Completely OT:
Well, that's part of my job description* and I work at a computer company in Taiwan. Foreigners get paid more than locals. Most companies are not big enough to justify the expense of an in-house native English speaker, and they're usually too cheap to outsource even small jobs to outside firms. If they did hire an expat to proofread their copy, you wouldn't be getting it for < US$99.

*I get paid to turn stuff like what @landroni quoted above into comprehensible English. It's often not a lot of fun.

 

XMOS U8 seems a bit old.

According to AGD: http://www.audio-gd.com/Products-EN.htm

Also, well-received Singxer's offerings (SU-1, F-1, ..) are all based on Xmos U208.
https://www.shenzhenaudio.com/singx...nterface-with-xmos-xu208-cpld-dsd256-dop.html

 

At risk of going too far off topic, this sort of stuff is a lot more expensive than you'd think. I work with translators, and you would not believe the amount of checks their work goes through, even for the most basic texts. The translation industry operates on the assumption that it's not adequate to google translate something and then fix the output into readable english. Even if you have a native english speaker you can trust, you're still running the risk of the abstract text (which is especially relevant in the audio world) getting lost or confused.

On the other hand if you really can't get someone to tell you that "sealed cattle" is a bit off, maybe you need to cast your marketing net wider.

 

A quick google search turns up a lot of "cattle" transformers, some are even "cows" and I saw one "bovine". I don't understand where that comes from, because most of them were called "ring transformer" and the pictures were of toroidal transformers.

 

Toro = Bull in Spanish

 

I expect there is a Chinese symbol that can mean several things, including something technical as well as something "bovine". My understanding is that Chinese is very much meaning based, and for the multitude of possible meanings for a given symbol / pinyin you get to pick what makes most sense in the context throughout the conversation / text. In this sense the scope for misunderstanding or translating error is great. This I believe is why several native people had difficulties translating Fang Bian's text to English... And even at the end English-speaking folks had trouble deciding what was really meant in some sentences.

 

But Franks has the best words... You can't comprehend his ultra-high technology, which is like a full PC miniaturised by dipping it into the event horizon of a black hole, that's all!

 

"Inexpensive" to us might be "unattainable" to a smaller Chinese entrepreneur. We talk of low bucks start-ups as having "started in a garage". Apple, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, and Harley-Davidson come to mind. This guy probably dreams to one day HAVE a garage. I have a Breeze Audio LPS and it is a workmanlike product. Typical of the genre, but workmanlike. Since his Engrish is worlds better than my Chinese, I'd just congratulate him on making something useful and trying to get it out there.

 

Maybe Department of Social Development is correct for the target market.