SBAF DAC Talk II

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by Maxx134, Jul 22, 2018.

  1. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    Airier, Hell yeah. The PCM1789 and AD1955 ain’t good at air. Older chips aren’t in general. The best air I’ve heard by far are Prism Sound dacs but it might be dialed in. Need another listen and direct ab comparison but they have the air, cleanliness, and detail in the treble and even if people might take issues with the lows.

    Resolving of other treble stuff? I don’t know. Some of the new chips in most dacs are actually smoothed over. Ak4490 only sounded hella detailed to me in the RME where it was wimp city. Solid state clipping, extensive digital clipping, and tape saturation are just right there on the Dangerous stuff and the neutral AD1955 dacs I’ve heard. I haven’t heard the Convert 2 yet though. I’ve heard the complain of “oh it sounds like a cleaner console or a 90s CD player” of the source and of course they were listening to an older recording with solid state clipping (Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, older Iron Maiden cd masters) or modern stuff with a ton of continuous digital clipping on transients. This isn’t “loudness war”. I don’t want to get into that in this thread as that gets super cringey for what most people listen to as who the hell wants a 5x louder than everything else clipped cymbal crash or snare rim shot preventing you from cranking the recording up to where the bass sounds reasonable (as if those 80s CDs have bass) at 80-95 dB or so for one thing like those old Iron Maiden CDs when played back on detailed tweeters?

    Back on topic, many people do not actually want treble detail like in Lavry and Dangerous dacs, they want smooth, clean, and incisive even if that’s lower fidelity.

    That’s ridiculous. clean regulated switching warts or higher powered floor bricks are available and mass produced by a few manufacturers. They’re just not cheap as hell and cost more than schiit linear warts and laptop power supplies.
    Dude Anything with a modern akm dac chip is the last thing you’ll want for drums that sound realistic. I haven’t heard anything that beats Dangerous Music gear for that but if it doesn’t work for your setup, you gotta get a new setup or use another box. I’m not shilling, but it is the best brand for that hands down I’ve ever heard. Grace and Schiit sound suoer colored in comparison and they’re not even close to the worst offenders. All of the Chinese Topping stuff, AGD, discrete resistor but no oven, and NOS DACs are god awful limp dick shit.

    Think of it like bread. Dangerous is a perfectly crusty baguette, Prism and Lavry are like a rich Cuban bread, Schiit and Grace are cake, Lynx is good pita, RME is lavash, cheap interfaces (anything below like 8 channel rackmount steinberg in quality) are Canadian white, Chifi Sabre is moldy wonderbread toasted burnt, and discrete objectivist resistor and NOS dacs are moldy wonderbread used a urinal cake and served up to you fresh and soggy with warm pee on a plate as crackhead French toast. Objectivist ones just omit the powdered sugar but are still piss.

    A lot of it has to do with the recordings and mixes and masters too. Most older kits have no real body, attack or dynamics due to poor well everything in the production process. Nothing even to do with loudness war. Lots of the “compressed ruined remasters” actually sound like they have real drums versus the wtf can play it at 110 dB and get nothing close to percussion dynamics not cymbal crashes original awful CDs. A lot of it is just poor micing, not using multibands well on stuff, poor compression, eq, is etc. lots of stuff is visceral too like Led Zeppelin IV, Rumors, Deicide, and Nevermind but it isn’t realistic sounding at all even if it makes you want to air drum. Some gear will universalize these to more normal and make stuff with no bass sound full despite “transparent” measurements
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2019
  2. westermac

    westermac Friend

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    Such vivid imagery. @Psalmanazar have you considered a career in spoken word poetry?
     
  3. HotRatSalad

    HotRatSalad Friend

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    Couldn't most if not all these attributes described in the post above fall into greater control from the amp and speakers or headphones.. dacs have certain nuances but it really seems like synergy and the amp and tranducers would be easier to bring out characteristics one prefers ? This all seems sort of nonconclusion like...
     
  4. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    Well the converter is the start of the analog or digital signal path, diy tweaker shit converters pretty much all suck, you can’t make them sound like other converters. Actually good, high-fidelity gear is just good and doesn’t need to synergize. Even more colored brands like Burl. It just has to actually work with the other gear in your setup. Two wrongs here don’t balance out.

    People trying to synergize lo-fi crap are better off just selling it and buying better gear if they want to negate the sound. Or just fix their rooms.
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2019
  5. Thenewerguy009

    Thenewerguy009 Friend

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    Funny you should mention that. Ted Smith specifically complained that Paul was pushing him to make the DS more warmer/bassier with the newer iteration from awhile back. Paul was under the assumption that people don't like that thin-ish hi-fi sound.
     
  6. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    At this point, anything Paul says is full of shit. It's like he hires random programmers to fix bugs, and the sound changes, he markets the new firmwares as upgrades, and makes up reasons why the sound changed. If he's gonna tell Art Dudley that the Infinity speakers guy and he "voiced" the Directstream for the Stereophile review, then he better be called out if the sound changes. As far the PWD2 getting thinner and thinner, I'm pretty sure I remember Paul saying this sound was what he wanted all along, to the chagrin of many owners. I guess enough of his customers told him I don't want any more of this Benchmark sounding lean shit, so he changed his mind.

    Keep in mind that this is the company that marketed power regeneration shit with a mode that "squared" off the AC sine wave, because if you do that, you get more energy in the duty cycle or whatever the f**k. Yeah, sorta makes sense (to dumb-ass old rich fart audiophiles who buy 15" full range drivers with massive peaks in the highs and proclaim they are good), except squaring off sine waves = odd order distortion. Sure, let's add 180Hz, 300Hz, 420Hz on top of the AC 60Hz signal. This is pure idiocy. Better off making a power regeneration device that runs 120V at 400Hz, like on airplanes (this actually might work with most gear that uses LPS).

    Everything other than the DAC - the power amps, that little small headphone/power-amp/phonostage (I forget what it was called), the transport, from this company are overpriced POS.

    P.S.

    And who the F is Ted Smith?
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2019
  7. winders

    winders boomer

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    ...and more hate.

    First off, I don’t have 15” single driver speakers nor have I heard them.

    I could give a rat’s ass about Paul McGowan.

    Ted Smith is the designer of the DirectStream DACs. He is actually an eccentric genius. He does not work for PS Audio.

    At this point I don’t give a flying f**k what you guys think about DACs or speakers. You are way to smug and think you shit doesn’t stink. If you didn’t think of it or discover it, it can’t be good.
     
  8. Mithrandir41

    Mithrandir41 Friend

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    You "couldn't" give a rats ass, and it's "too". Grammar Nazi moment of the day.
     
  9. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    seriously, man, you're not your gear, and your gear isn't who you are. all this stupid shit is boxes plugged into boxes that make noise. stop taking it so personally.
     
  10. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Then why so offended because I obviously wasn't referring to you.
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2019
  11. Thenewerguy009

    Thenewerguy009 Friend

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    Well I would care, if they actually heard it.
    Skem & you are the only ones with the current build, though everybody else seems to have a Yggdrasil, yet no one with both to give a detailed comparison.
     
  12. skem

    skem Friend

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    If someone wants to lend me Yggdrasil, I, and probably another local SBAF friend, will happily give our impressions. :D
     
  13. Vtory

    Vtory Audiophile™

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    That hardly happens. It takes at least four weeks (3 wks for warm up and one week for evaluation?)...
    The other way (PSDS to other Yggdrasil owner) may be more feasible. lol
     
  14. skem

    skem Friend

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    I have a hard time buying the whole 3-week warmup thing—I think some of that has to be brain burn-in. 2-3 days seemed realistic for Gungnir Multibit. In any case, the spouse would kill me if the DirectStream disappeared (seriously!).

    I have often thought of doing the Schiit trial period but don’t want to spend the $120 for an experience that I expect to be similar to Gungnir Multibit.
     
  15. Vtory

    Vtory Audiophile™

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    I agree that 3 days are kinda realistic minimum for Gungnir Multibit -- never thought it "enough" though. To me one week was the borderline of starting to think "oh, it's good enough".

    Now, there are more bits for Yggdrasil. So, multiply "Gungnir Multibit period" by 2^delta. Mathematics and physics are sometimes cruel.
     
  16. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Buy it yourself and report back. It's obvious that you have your mind set on it from reading the PSA forums of how the the owners were touched by angels with the latest firmware.

    While I have not heard the latest firmware, it's already pretty obvious the PSA DS DAC has a sound of its own which is fundamentally different from that of the Yggdrasil, which sound is different from Solaris, Convert-2, Pavane, SFD, and so on.

    It's less that members hate PSA (and many here do hate PSA - recognizing our biases) and more that members are ambivalent about it. They are content with their own DACs and already have a idea of the path they want to go, and the Direct Stream happens to be not on that path, whether it be sound, price, PSA hate, or other reasons.

    Finally, do you want to know why members think the firmware upgrade thing is bogus? It's because there are probably at least 7, maybe even 12 versions floating around. This makes any kind of comparison impossible, because it comes down to which version. A PSA fanboy can always pull out the "which version" or "drastically different" card, which IMO is bullshit*. Yes, there are some differences, but what seems big when we are fixated and in "zoom-in" mode becomes quite small when we step out of our bubble.

    By the way, this is why attending meets or having people over are a great way to set up our systems better.

    Finally, rather than getting too worked up about what @Psalmanazar says, concern yourself with your own path. What do you like among the affordable DACs? What don't you like? What do you want better? Knowing this will allow others to give you advice on what path to go. This is the true SBAF way. Finally ask not what SBAF can do for you, but ask what you can do for SBAF.

    *FPGA is re-configurable, but the the molecules aren't going to rearrange themselves into different types of transistors, and the power supply and digital receivers remain the same. Also DSD / PWM processing does have a sound of its own.
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2019
  17. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    Wasn't Paul McGowan the guy who was not Withnail in Withnail and I?
     
  18. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Don't bother. You've already heard the Schiit A1 DACs. The improvements to the A2 are incremental, a little deeper stage, a little more resolving, a little denser, a little sweet (mids for Yggdrasil, upper-mids for Gungnir), a little more fluid and less grainy, a swap in tonality - but otherwise they are still at their core Yggdrasil and Gungnir.
     
  19. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    LOL, that's hilarious. I think he was actually Withnail. It depends upon looks or name similarity.
     
  20. brencho

    brencho Friend

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    I NEED SOMETHING'S FLESH
     

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