SBAF DAC Talk II

I think it's cool they give Ted Smith free reign to design, you think Directstream's bad, wait until you see his Whack DAC! But at least the firmware on that IS the DAC, not just a filter.

Just one of the boards...


There's a story somewhere, they brought in new people to help with/review the code... ended up firing their software guy... as it was unmaintainable spaghetti tower of babel code*. They are still unraveling/rewriting it today!

I remember the endless talk of gapless playback and other crap... ugh! I'd be pissed too!

Their stuff has always been too expensive, big part is probably that they're still on the dealer model.

Boo... if it got buried/missed @purr1n:
https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/sbaf-dac-talk-ii.6964/page-9#post-240493

*the PWD/PWT timeframe

 

Thanks for the input! I have contacted Emotiva to find out how the volume is controlled and I'll report back once I hear from them. Last time it took a couple days and they had a pretty good answer to my question.

Thank you for the impressions! Hopefully the PT-100 is as good or better than the DC-1.

 

O.k., since you are the Satanic Cliff Clavin, I assume your job is a mailman & you are opening up other people's PS Audio Directstream packages to give a listen to before delivering it to them, because that's the only way you would know for a fact that it is bad.

Unless you have some sort of psychic audio powers & can deduce audio gear quality with some sort telepathy.

 

How difficult is it to just ignore others' pov and enjoy your stuff ?

 

Others point of view is fine, assuming they actually listened long enough, owned or tested said equipment.

Just spouting bullshit about a product they never even heard, is kind of against what this forum was built on.

 

I would say my comments above are framed in the overly analytical/critical mindset. It's still competent and "enjoyable" to listen to. I believe if you're not trying to chase the dragon the PT-100 will certainly do the job (and I still like going to my friend's place to listen to tunes even in the absence of my gears).

 

Yeah I just remember being impressed by it reminding me of my old Apogee miniDAC but it had shitter usb than Schiit with the same chip (Schiit usb works on like half their products fine for me and the other half doesn’t work at all. Emotiva drivers just didn’t work at all) and never scaled out of spdif and aes/ebu that much. Compared to the Lavry black dacs, it’s just bad but also it was like 300 bucks on sale once and the only other things decent for that price ever were Yamaha CD players, Bifröst Uber and thr 4 channel steinberg interface. The lavry da11 always had better treble and more detail but it frickin scales like hell in stage the moment you switch from old usb to spdif or AES from a good source, it goes going from just “good, can’t complain” to “whoa this Dan Lavry dude knows what the hell he’s doing!” As the staging just gets better and you know why people with infinite money like Sony and Iron Maiden were so impressed despite the warmth. Emotiva doesn’t give me that feeling, just the feeling of it’s not bad.

Who knows where and how they screwed up the sound? Volume control, analog stage, board layout, usb probably a ton of places all interacting at once to make smoothed bass and not great treble. Poor stage might be the clock. Dunno, don’t care. I got something that’s basically the Cro-Mags to Emotiva’s Green Day now.

 

PeeShit Audio DirectStream sounded like compressed etched shit the first time I heard it. I don’t care to hear it again. I don’t care if they have claimed to fix it. They could’ve spent under ten bucks on a for Audio dac chip, used the frickin on chip filters, and had a competent product like DA10/11, Hilo, Source, ADI2 Pro/DAC, or even the fuckin Modi. Instead they decided to be dumbasses and appeal to tweakers and release diarrhea. I don’t watch German porn so I have no interest in hearing that shit again. Maybe some people do but those people are statistical anomalies who fantasize about Windows ME.

 

When did you hear it & with what equipment?
You are the only person I seen to use the words etched & compressed when talking about the DS.

 

Also what firmware? I definitely heard it with Hd 650 but I don’t remember what else. It was German porn with a decent looking German woman on the cover bad as the casework was acceptable. PeeShit is shitty.

 

Sigh .....

 

Maybe the old firmware was like that. The lastest Redcloud & Snowmass firmware are about as far away from being lean & compressed as they come.

 

There is then almost no point to talk about that dac with it's close to infinite versions of firmware.
It's like the diy dacs where hundreds of takes for filters are available.
Such a thing is barely tolerable for diy pile; they should be sued for releasing commercial product like that.

 

Why not talk about the DirectStream DAC?

I am not sure that anyone should call a number less than 15 “infinite”.

One of the greatest strengths of the DirectStream DAC is that it is field upgradeable. I would say that most people that own the DAC view that as a positive feature and not something to be considered intolerable. Even Torq commented that he thought it being field upgradable was a great feature (not an exact quote).

I have had my DirectStream for a little over a year now and Snowmass is the first update in that time. I started out with Redcloud, which was great and better in my system than the Yggdrasil I had at the time. Snowmass is a nice incremental step up from Redcloud.

Or do you just hate PS Audio, Paul McGowan, and anything they sell? Me? I am a Ted Smith fan. I like the sound I get with his DAC.

 

Nobody cares what Torq thinks or who made what. They care about what it does, how it sounds, and what it costs. PS Audio DirectStream fails all three. Either everyone else on earth but this Ted Smith guy is wrong or the DirectStream is some compressed, low detail euphonic crap whose sound changes based on whatever flavor coffee the code monkey got at the gas station that morning.

 

Psal, not saying that his words are the supreme truth, but they do carry weight to a lot of people, including myself.

 

FTFY. From what I’ve seen we are not going to see the same quality of reviews given he works for headphone.com. Now everything’s the best, but some things are besterest.

 

Normally I was say if reviews are on a website, and they're all "this is great", it's usually to influence sales. However, there are reviews from products that headphone.com doesn't even sell. Not everyone enjoyed his long-winded style of writing and that's fine. But I don't think it's fair to assume that because he's reviewing for a website that isn't SBAF, he's shilling.

I own DirectStream Jr. and really like it. Compared it to Yggdrasil A1 awhile ago and kept the DS. But if it isn't pro gear, it's all shit. So pick your pile, amirite.