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Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: Another take on Schiit Bifrost

You are expecting to much from a $350 DAC IMO.

In order to get an analog sound from digital, you need really low jitter, distortion and noise. This equates to discrete circuits, expensive clocks and power systems.

Everyone seems to think that chip technology will eventually fix this and the price will be really cheap for analog sound quality from digital. Never happen IMO, and here is why:

The D/A silicon is certainly getting a lot better than it was (except for the digital filtering), but for excellent SQ you still need some basic passive building blocks, including capacitors, resistors and transformers that behave more like textbook perfect models as well as circuit boards that have really low dielectric constants.

These are all really expensive technologies that dont appear to be coming down much over time. Most are actually increasing in price. Also, as I mentioned, discrete circuits are needed for both analog stages and voltage regulators to achieve low jitter, noise and distortion. These take up a lot of board space and add cost, sometimes a lot. One transistor that I use in a discrete voltage regulator costs me $25 each. Op-amps have not improved dramatically recently, although there are more decent choices than 15 years ago. Good ones can cost $30 each. Most new Op-amp designs are for other than audio applications. These chip companies see the high-end audio and recording studio business as small potatoes, which it is.

Even if you have all of these high-performance parts at your disposal and no price constraints, the designer must still be aware of all of these and able to apply them properly to optimize performance in the circuit design and board implementation. There even expensive DACs that miss the mark here.


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