Abbas DACs

yeah! you can even draw outside the lines if you want

 

0.11SE costs 850USD, while importing gungnir into EU will cost you 1700USD. Now with the war in Ukraine the situation is more complex, but this particular DAC wasn't a bad option for something with a different flavor.

 

No, kits do not come with a chassis.
I suspect it would arrive more safely without one.

He used to have many options available through his original eBay account, including extra chassis and other clearance options. But as K4star stated times have changed.

Full stock list is usually through email.
there you might find the TDA1543 0.11

but if you have 1541 crowns I would suggest that one from my experience.

Personally I am waiting for the 14 bit lofi Dac X

 

Here is the recent pricelist (he provides it through email), all the devices are fully assembled with tubes included:

DAC Z TDA1543 SOLD---------------------------------------------------

DAC 0.11 SE TDA1543, EZ90, EZ90, 6N6P wooden front panel 850usd

DAC X SE +output stage 7/1ver. 6BL7+5V4+EZ90+EB91+E180F TDA1540P coming soon, price will be formed later------------------------------------------

DAC2.2 SOLD---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAC 2.3SE + output stage 7/1 ver. E182CC+5Y3 +EZ90+EB91+E180F TDA1541R1 ----------------------------------------------- -------------------------------SOLD

DAC 2.3SE signature+ output stage 7/1ver. TDA1541A, black gate power tank WK caps , siemens power transformer in digital section -------------SOLD

DAC2.4SE 6X5+EAA91+E180F+ TDA1541+ 6BL7+5V4 2900 usd + EI power transformer "GD workshop".

DAC2.4SE 6X5+EAA91+E180F+ TDA1541+ 2X 6SN7+ EI power transformer "GD workshop" 2900usd wooden front panel.

DAC4.1SE 5687+EZ90+EZ35 PCM58P ( we have the last set of pcbs) 1980 usd

DAC4.2SE 5687 +EZ80+5Y3 PCM58P price will be formed later---------------------------------------

DAC 5.0 SE + output stage 7/1 ver. 5687 +5Y3( 5V4 ), EZ80, AD1865 / AD1864 i/u=niobium resistors 2280 usd

DAC U.1 SE + output stage 7/1 ver. 5687, 5Y3 ( 5V4) , EZ80 PCM63P i/u=niobium resistors 2280 usd

DAC3.1SE --------------- SOLD

DAC3.2SE + 6080 output stage, + 5Y3+ 5V4+ EZ81+ EF12+EZ11, TDA1541A---------------------------------------- temporarily we have no parts for this model !

RIAA tube preamplifier SE version 2X EF86, 2X EL84, EZ80 2400 usd
RIAA tube preamplifier 2 X EF86, 6N6P, 6X5 wooden front panel 780usd
MC SUT 1:10 280usd ( Only as an option when ordering RIAA preamplifier)

Tube clock EF12/EZ11 in the metal housing 580 usd
Tube USB converter in the metal housing EAA91/EAA91/EC86/ECC88----- temporarily we have no parts for this model !

Hybrid headphone amplifier 2X 6N6P, AD132/AD148 siemens, 6X5 tube rectifier, two switched inputs, BG caps, 1280 usd
Tube headphone amplifier 2X EC86, 2X 6080,BG caps ,audio note tantalum resistors 400/410/170/ two switched inputs 12kg! no output transformers, headphone impedance 60...600ohm 1780 usdTube headphone amplifier 2X EC86, 2X 6080,BG caps, audio note tantalum resistors 400/410/170/ two switched inputs 13kg! output transformers, headphone impedance 6...60ohm 2080 usd

 

It is a small, basically one man operation, building devices out of vintage components. Almost every single dac will have some differences in the chosen/available components.

 

So I'm still getting to know the Abbas 2.3SE that @Ksorota has so generously lent me through a personal loaner, but some things that stick out while listening to Balmorhea's The Wind Live in Marfa tonight:

• Cello is intoxicatingly vivid
• note decays and the microdynamic interplay between string/fret tone and the overlying harmonics on some of the guitar work is some of the best I've heard in my system
• similarly, it's not just the decay of notes; crescendos from ppp and pppp to mf are so continuous and finely graduated that you can sense the physicality of the player drawing the bow across the sting. It's stunning, really.

I won't reiterate the reasons why this DAC (so far, IME) isn't going to tickle the pickles of the hyper-resolution or Moffat-bass crew, but I won't use the term "musical" to describe what I'm hearing either. But, my experience so far squares well with the impressions of @Merrick, @EagleWings, and @tommytakis. If you find yourself curious about what convincing tone, timbre, and realistic dynamic contrast can be, then, even with my limited time with the DAC so far, I can whole heartedly recommend an audition. It reminds me a lot of my old Rega DAC, but with way better dynamics (both macro and micro) and without all the fuzzy haze that that DAC seemed to have.

I'll append this post with some more in depth impressions as I spend some more time with it.

Edit: some more quick impressions tonight. For folks wanting some comparisons: Pi2AES into Abbas via coax is really, really close to Audio Lab CDT into Yggdrasil LIM - I've kind of been suspect of digital transport quality and how it affects perceived differences between DACs, and this little experiment only reinforces my suspicions. Need to do some more listening!

Edit2: Okay, so now that I've spent a decent number of evenings comparing the Abbas with LIM (and by proxy, A2 by memory), I think I can come to some general conclusions:

• Abbas is more convincing with smaller scale, simpler (but well done) recordings, and not by a small measure
• LIM is more of a "master of none, capable of all", and IME better in that regard than A2, but with this qualifier: I mean master of non, capable of all in that LIM allows enough of a recording's characteristic flaws/excellence to come through with less glassing-over than what A2 seems impart; like the A2 imparts a slight sheen I'd not really noticed until comparing with LIM, the Abbas really allows these types of recording artifacts to be noticed, but not distracting
• Abbas loses some of the grit and crunch that lives at the edges of attack, much of what helps music sound immediate without the typical digital haze, but that could be just what I'm used to hearing having spent most, if not all, of my speaker time with Schiit R2R DACs for the last several years
• Abbas does low-level listening superbly, something I also particularly enjoyed with A2, but that LIM seems to lose a little in comparison to both
• Abbas is not syrupppy, goooey, slow, dim-witted, limp-dick, or whatever I usually think when I hear "NOS"

In summary, though there's a lot that I really enjoy with the Abbas, while directly comparing with LIM, I don't feel that either DAC is really presenting everything (and I mean everything in an absolute sound kind of way) in a more completely realistic way; they're both 8.7/10, but they don't certainly sound the same. Abbas tends towards the emotionally engaging side of things, while LIM tends towards a politeness in presenting a midrange focused tonality that intends to please; it's agreeable. Even if neither are completely honest in their presentation, LIM would need less fussing about with the rest of one's system to integrate. If I were to pick up an Abbas DAC, i would probably need to reconsider some other component choices in order to maximize synergy. This strikes me as a DAC that would drive a "source first" component chain, more so in order to extract everything I think it gets "right", and less to mitigate what many might think a NOS DAC might get "wrong". All in all, the Abbas is the most wholly integrated NOS DAC I've heard in my system. it has all of the yummy, reach-out-and-touch-it palpability with none of the flaccid bass/wet blanket treble and whiffleball bat transients that just about every other NOS DAC i've spent time with has.

Thanks again to @Ksorota for this opportunity - it is greatly appreciated!!!

 

Anyone have more experiences--w either his DACs and amps or other creations (tube clocks, phono stages, preamps)?

Abbas is in the process of building me his EC86/EC88 (a thankful tube family choice, as these, which sound an awful like the much more well-known and expensive ECC88 aren't quite half of that tube, but close electrically, they're single triodes and cheap as chips--can get 1961 Siemens, early white print Amperex, pristine Phillips Miniwatts for under $60/pair on eBay right now) + 6080 OTL amp and a TDA1543 .11SE DAC at the same time lol.

Should receive the DAC first, I was told that's abt a two week build, but the amp will be a lil longer, 2-3 months. I'm surprised he actually agreed to make me an amp, it seems like most of his time now is devoted to his long waitlist for DACs.

It's already been a month since i laid down the first payment, so w 1-2 more months + shipping from UKR + customs... I'll be lucky to have both by Christmas lol.

 

Got my .11SE in last week. Ab 23 days from UKR to my local USPS (they made me come pick it up lol).

Came w Mazda and Tung Sol ez90s and an east euro 6n6p.

more impressions to come as I experiment w different sources. But for now, ya, I’m stoked lol.

 

Looks like a very clean build. Curious to hear your impressions. What's the cost for the .11se if you don't mind me asking? Nvm, I read through the thread.

 

Very cool!

It looks like he is using some old carbon composite resistors and the old Russian can style paper in oil capacitors. It's truely a labor of love how he listens to a wide range of components.

Enjoy.

 

Abbas .11SE impressions

OK, since i'm sick w Covid, I thought write a lil novella (I will put in bold below where the DAC impressions actually start lol), that now would be a good time for some quick 'n' dirty impressions of Abbas's lowest-priced offering with the "SE" badge, the TDA1543-chipped .11SE.

(SE, meaning special edition ig, all i know is he picks the components a lil more carefully without as much regard for cost, so you'll see a couple BG caps in mine, and as @lehmanhill pointed out, those weird lookin' Rus*ian PIO caps.)

This DAC was a complete roll of the dice, an aleatory moment of the great YOLO. The big f**k It (Why Not Reprise).

I was already ordering an OTL amp from Abbas, and after the SFD-1 debacle and subsequent selling of that DAC, I needed a new one.

Not knowing what I wanted, but def wanting to try something new, @uniqusrname suggested while i wait for my white whale, i should pick up this Adcom GDA 600, equipped with dual PCM63-Js, off eBay.

Guy had it listed for $350, no offer button. Dang. Messaged him, offered $300 and bingo, bango, we had a deal. The 12lb black rectangle showed up on my doorstep not long after I sent the funds via eBay.

Well, that DAC and I just did not get along. PCM63-K might be a hurricane in the Theta Gen Va, or an upper echelon Monarchy DAC, like Ev has. But with Adcom's implementation, it was brittle, hard, digital, and constipated. One of the most unmusical DACs I've ever heard.

The best moment w that thing was when I boxed it up to send off to uniq to get mod-hotrodded into some TOTL decoder, which he says is possible.

So as I said, I was already getting familiar w Abbas, and paying down the OTL little by little each week, he said it would take 2-3 months to complete. I'd heard good things about the .11SE from friends both here and elsewhere. So I just asked him to build me one, while in the middle of the OTL build. He said 11 days at most to finish. I said yes and made one $500 payment upfront.

As one does when the gear you want is unable to be trialed and you only have a few lines of impressions to go off of, I researched as much as I could. For some reason my Chrome browser just would *not* auto-translate Ukrainian into English, so I sifted through old Abbas forums, searching for any info on his 1543 DACs, hitting View > Translate on every single page. PITA.

I didn't find much info, most people fall into two camps: his Burr Brown customers, who want a DAC that sounds like itself most of the time, or ultra fan-girls of his higher-tier, pickier, more temperamental & chameleonic TDA1541, who know what the f**k they're doing w their chain.

The 1543 is kinda in the middle, I'd say? He originally came up with the idea for a 1543 DAC--I read-- during the pandemic, based on an old Slavic wager, which by the ancient noble tradition goes like this:

If one Slav challenges another, one must either exceed the challenge or hang his head in shame, and something to do w their Babusia (think Babushka, and you got it) no longer being able to cook for you, and shaving your head, I think?

So yeah, someone in Abbas's inner-circle said "yes, you can work magic with 1541, but can't just ab anyone, given enough time and resources?"

"What about an IC with 11 bits of effective resolution?" "Can you make that sound good?"

Well, obviously, Abbas had to accept. It's a matter of honor in Ukraine, of course. So he originally wanted to name this DAC the "folk DAC"—his vision was something low cost ($850 USD is what I paid), sounds incredible, and easily made.

Anyone who knows the 1543 DAC knows that unless you at least parallelize them, or better yet, 4x or 8x them, that second part is going to be very, very tricky. @Azimuth told me this is due to inherently low amp output of the 1543, adding more increases that value.

But Abbas persisted, and tinkered away, as he does. And made the DAC I ordered from him possible.

10 days later, he was putting the finishing touches on it--right on time. I made the second payment + shipping cost, which wasn't that bad, I know it was under $100.

I checked the tracking almost everyday for 22 straight days. Finally! It went, somehow, from customs in NYC, to failed delivery attempt at my doorstep, over 1,000 miles away? I dunno, the tracking I was using was prob a lil fucky.

Anyway, I just decided to grab the DAC from the local USPS it was being held at while on lunch break at work. Can't say I got much done that day, imagining what the DAC was gonna sound like ims.

Actual DAC impressions

The thing ab Abbas lowest grade SE offering is... it is immediately pleasing.

it is more tubed than most other tube DACs out there, which mainly only use a pair of tube output buffers, usu of the 6922 variety (minus Border Patrol, which i think use triode in the power supply, or out-of-reach AN DACs, or some weird chinesium shit), this one has 2 types: a single 6n6p and 2x ez90 rectifier tubes.

so, the tda1543 on its own, single chip, along w having 11-12 effective number of bits, measures like absolute shit, we all know this lol.

But, can this DAC punch, and punch, and punch, if SFD-1 w UA is Ali--then this DAC is Tyson all day long.

Just straight knock out, match's over, paid all the PPV monies for nuffin kinda strength. It's lively like the best of Siemens tubes (that's just an analogy, i think it actually came w/ an east euro 6n6p, and mazda & tung sol ez90s) and energetically something i like to call “aggro macro”, meaning more aggressive and in-your-face (not in terms of soundstage tho, wrt to that, it's rather average--not 2D like SD, but also not capacious, it's in the middle, has some laterality & verticality but is on the "cozier" side of big) macrodynamics.

the only disappointment i have is that the tone is not as gorgeous as SFD-1 w UA, that DAC could tone w literally the best out there, but it was often soft, often laid back, often hazy, esp. in the bass—this is a cohesive ice-water slap in the face of *live*.

So i have to add a new definition to my sonic lexicon, so there's “analog”, right? we all think we know what that means, and we all have our own perception of it, but what ab “live”? as in music being played right in front of you, w big, gigantic speakers, at 110 SPL.

that's what this DAC gives you, closer to the live music experience than listening in to the recording room w an all analog recording chain, if that makes sense.

It's ab experience, BAC marcodynamics (it has almost no plankton lol, how could it?), swingin' dynamic leaps and twists that emotionally engage you at every turn, from note to note, color as vibrancy rather than an always-on sepia tone filter (which in this regard is actually less colored than say, the SFD-1) and fuckin' drive, buffeting the sides of your skull with as much musical information as your poor brain can handle.

It’s extremely source picky, but not quite as much as they say ab Abbas DACs. It sounds better from my Marantz 5004, which passed thru Marv’s, Tommy’s. and Merrick’s hands, who passed it on to me, but not that much better than my pi2aes w cheap 24v LPS.

A little less digititus, a little more smooth (less blocky, square, hard), a little better in the timing and rhythm dept. Operative phrase here tho is: "a little". I dunno if i could reliably pass an a/b test between the two, I'll just say that.

Blame the Sanyo mech, or praise the pi2aes, either one works.

If it’s anything like his 3.2 DAC--which I heard at Tommy's house in the San Fernando Valley while visiting Calabasas for a memorial--then the best source would be an Abbas ez11/ez12 (wartime 3rd Reich tubes with a Waffen SS logo on them, not joking) modified CDT, something w a CDM 1 or 9 in it.

Overall, I’d say it’s more resolving than I thought it would be, having seen measurements of the 1543, and less colored as well, those two things struck me first. It just sounds like what it is: a bomb. an IED. Explosive and kinna dangerous. Not for the faint of heart.

Easily the most "alive" and true-to-life DAC i've ever heard ims. Does it have the midrange or soundstage of Ultra Analog? No. Does it have the modern R2R sound? c'mon. Does it have the goods, is it worth your trouble?

Well, that's a hard one: this one is hard to rec unless you know what you're getting into and have actually read the terms & conditions, and clicked "accept" anyway, not due to sound--which i think many of you would actually really like if you heard it, but due to all the rest of the shit, possibly showing up DOA due to vintage components biting the dust, longish wait lists/delivery times, sending back to UKR if there ever is a problem w it.

If you like gambling w your audio choices, this is a perfect sub 1K DAC as regards SQ--it's a taste of something forbidden, a possible sound foreclosed by the Rocknas, Holos and Denafrips of the world, a lil slice of truly vintage IC and components (this is, after all, one of the first DAC chips ever produced) combining to generate a sound not quite like anything else made today, and you can say you have a coupla coats of violin varnish on the PCB of your DAC, too (also not joking).

But if you want safe, reliable and warrantied w locations in the US, look elsewhere. All told. All forewarned.

 

Epic review indeed. The big question is, "Are you going to keep it?"

 

oh the only source rolling ill be doing for a long, long while is an Abbas-modded Arcam CDT, and possibly a Holo Red 2.0/Hydra Z + ZPM LPS. goin' full bomb-maker stack bb

 

It will be interesting to read your impressions as you put more hours on it. Do you run in 24/7? I bought the older 1543 model, the 0.1SE a couple of years back and would just power it for a few hours here and there as it sat in my main setup. This past year though i've been running it 24/7 in the office, the source is an Apogee Ensemble Firewire(that i just use for the digital audio), also powered 24/7. It got so good recently that i swapped, i moved the 4.1SE to the office to run it 24/7. As a side bonus it slightly warms the room as well.

I miss the magic in the midrange of the 1543(especially thinks like bells and female vocals) but the PCM58 is improving by the day so i have high hopes. The 4.1SE does everything else better though so it's a tradeoff i'm willing to live with. Still, i think i paid 650 euros back before inflation for the 0.1SE and it came with a $100 Mullard ECC88. All my Abbas DACs are running their original tubes.

If you can eat the electricity bill, try leaving everything with a clock on 24/7.

 

Just sold this DAC, waiting on Abbas shipping his newest 3.21 DAC to me, so I'll have impressions of his 1541 DACs, but yes, there is magic in the 1543, but I am so, so glad the .11SE was changed to a different tube type than ECC88—I hate that tube lol.

 

This gets me thinking what different setups with different focuses would bring to one's audio world... one system being source first, another being amp first and another being transducers first.

 

Which 3.2 did you get? SE or Signature?

Any intial impressions?

 

Hi @limberpine, sadly Caute will not be able to please us with an enthusiastic response as he unfortunately passed away very recently. Please leave your regards here, if you wish:

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/rip-caute-michael.14013/

 

I had no idea. While I had zero interaction with him, it's sad to hear of the passing of a fellow Abbas fanatic.