Denafrips R2R DAC

Has anyone heard of the company Denafrips? It looks like it's a Taiwanese company that makes R2R DAC's, the lowest end starting at $11500 NT ($369 US). Unfortunately there don't seem to be many impressions about their products, and their website seems to be a bit out of date http://www.denafrips.com/ (It's in Chinese). Their Facebook page seems to be more up to date: https://www.facebook.com/Denafrips/.

 

There is a thread going on at HF regarding the Ares DAC. Not very informative so far, but the original poster apparently prefers it to the Holo Spring he used to own. FWIW, their cheapest R2R is now the DAC-68 (500 US), and specs look mighty impressive for the price: dual 18 bit resolution ladder dac, balanced XLR outputs, big toroidal power supply (it has to be a plus right?) plus DSD support. Might get one for the heck of it.

 

I had their 8Pro stack. Good sounding for the price. But unreliable.

 

Maybe I'm deficient in sleep ... but as I read the thread the Spring DAC was "enthusiastically" ditched in favor of the Ares before the Ares had arrived. That's not a very compelling "comparison".

As a point of cognitive consistency, I tend to prefer things I DO own to things I USED to own, no matter how they might perform respectively. Because if I was buying shit I didn't like in favor of stuff I did ... well ... that'd tell it's own story ... and one in which I could reasonably be accused of being the village idiot.

 

There's no magic to laying out an array of powers-of-two resistors (or resistor combinations) and switching them quickly with a set of shift-registers and a suitable controller (PIC, FPGA, etc.). It's doing it accurately, without imbuing the circuit with a metric-assload of electrical/switching noise that gets interesting.

And getting decent linearity via any kind of reasonable tolerance (at least compared to LSI IC implementations) is another matter entirely.

 

Likely to be in contention for Stereophile's 'Most Caps Per Square Inch Award 2017'.

 

Wow, that's going to be a motherfucker to deal with when one of those develops an intermittent fault.

 

Nice donut.

 

Indeed, it is not the most convincing endorsement, and of course, implementation rather than chip selection or resistor soldering is the most important factor to get a good sounding DAC. And it would be nice to have more impressions/ feedback from objective users to form a more precise opinion.

Still, looking at the board and the features you get for the price, it is tempting to get one to try out. Mainboard implementation looks awfully similar to off the shelf Soekris 1201 implementations, Metrum Musette and other Audio GD 19 Singularity thingies.

While the brand is largely unknown (apparently, according to Google Translate, even Taiwanese deplores the lack of branding/ marketing effort domestically), even has a goofy name and reliability might be a concern, for 500 bucks, it doesn't sound like too much a risk to take, with potentially a lot of upside.

 

Aye, "Denafrips" does sound like some sort of 1970s denture disinfectant, it is truly "goofy".

 

Anything that has Fripp in its name is good in my book!

 

"... 18 bit resolution..."

Why would I want that? We live in a 24 bit world. Damn thing is obsolete.

 

That would be its bigger brother

 

Fucksticks.. Is that a shoop, or does that device actually exist?

 

At that point, why not just make a separate power supply? You can fit more buzzwords into multiple boxes.

 

I think that is the separate power supply.
The box with the dac chips is in another chassis.

 

This scenario flashed into my mind:

Electronics Tech: "I've got good news and bad news. First, you only need to have one capacitor replaced and your DAC will operate as good as new."
Owner: "Sounds great! How much will that run me?"
Electronics Tech: "Well, there's the rub, I don't know which capacitor."

 

Top-of-the-line model...looks comfy...
Still, is there any good reason to use a small-caps-mattress beyond the quicker charge-discharge vs larger capacitors idea? Their most expensive models have a lot of more caps than their entry level, so it does not look like it is a matter of going el cheapo...

 

What? It's 213 capacitors!

 

That's what she said.