MSB's 28.5bit dac

Power-dacs.

To the best of my understanding (ie: I read a few wikipedia articles), powerdacs are an offshoot of class D amps. Instead of running a regular dac to produce an analog signal then ramping it up and subsequently pumping it through the pwm digitizing voodoo machine to make with sound, we skip the analog signal portion and run the 0's and 1's directly into the voodoo machine. So it amps it up in the digital realm, rather than "analog". Or maybe I've been smoking some good mojo and am totally off the horse on this one.

But even then, you're heading into the heavy duty pro audio stuff if you're pushing out 100+V's

 

Lol, not an entirely awful idea. Shorter chain at least.

 

Don't think their numbers are nonsense...

Actually their claim is 173dB dynamic range.
Their output voltage = 10Vpp = 3.5Vrms (balanced).
Rout = 75 Ohms
It will be hard to reach the noise numbers when going SE.
see manual

This works out at 22nVpp = 8nVrms noise voltage.

As long as they do not have any active electronics behind their ladder and passive volume control thingy these values may well be feasable.
You need a very stable clock though, which they claim they did achieve.

For that price it might as well.

Audible benefits ?

 

Over a 20 kHz bandwidth at 20C, the thermal noise due to a 75 Ohm resistor is about 150 nV, which is higher than 8 nV. If you try to build a thing with resistors low enough in resistance to have 24-bit precision, you end up with something like a power amp, because the additional current draw of the low resistors will generate more heat, which in turn generates more noise. I'm highly skeptical of MSB's numbers. They might be doing some sort of band-by-band averaging to get numbers that low.

 

@2min of video, there's 16 dac channels summed together without use of output buffer.

 

Pfft, why bother when you can just run a pair of 9018s in mono mode and get the same thing

 

Indeed, Johnson noise will be hard to escape.

With 3.5V 75Ohm balanced out it works out at -150dB S/N ratio (which isn't the same as dynamic range).
You will need at least a 16x lower output resistance to achieve -173dB S/N ratio with 3.5 V out.

One could ask MSB how they got to their numbers....

 

That is one hellishly expensive casing.

 

That video has horrible sound quality. Blasting volume in the intro and then noisy and soft.
The tech seems neat, though. But doubt those specs are achievable.

 

Kind of a zombie thread bump here but I saw something about this DAC and I was wondering who is the target market for a $90k dac that has $10k to $40k add-ons? Is it purely gazillionaires or are there just regular joes who save up for years to buy a 90k dac? Do any of you have a single piece of music equipment that is in this price range?

It reminded me of a Tom Green segment from years back where he visits Fabio's house and finds a kitchen full of motorcycles, a fridge that pretty much only contained I Can't Believe it's Not Butter and a million dollar hifi system. I don't really know hifi speakers but you can get a good look at some of the components.



So anyway... is it just Fabio that is dropping this kind of money on audio?

 

Target market is rb2013 or Jude? No, I am 100% sure it's intended for people like GUTB.

 

GUTB can't afford it.

 

Isn't that the idea behind MSB's electrostatic headphone amp?

Those look like Martin Logan speakers powered by some Nelson Pass electronics.

Isn't that the idea behind MSB's electrostatic headphone amp?

 

What they are saying on their page is utter nonsense or some truly out of the box thinking. No matter, the claimed 173 dB of their dac dr is gone now.
I'd bet that there is no additional buffer between the dac and hp amp, which would not be anything new or special.
But then maybe their dac's r-2r now operates at high voltage and really drives hp-s.

 

So if you look at their Effective Bits Measurement System: There's a 22 Bit ADC, so how the hell did they measure beyond 22bits is a mystery/out of human logic to me, especially the part with the +70db gain preamp.(are they measuring the preamp or something? Shouldn't it be DAC direct to ADC via balanced XLR analog cable)

http://www.msbtech.com/products/measurements.php?Page=dacSelect


For reference, -120db(THD+N) is the best you can do with APx555: