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In Reply to: RE: Why does a ten year old NOS DAC sound so good? posted by Freo-1 on May 29, 2014 at 16:48:17
About the newer DACs having hyper-detail. I think that is great.
So far, I can determine some characteristics that are desirable in a DAC:
1. Detailed sound.
2. Rich sound.
3. Good timing.
4. Good bottom end.
5. Good interface.
Are they related? I don't know. I think the older audiophile DACs had the 'rich sound'. But, I wouldn't give up good timing for anything, that the newer DACs seem to have. Whether the other items follow or lead from that, I don't know.
Follow Ups:
Did the older DACs have that rich sound for the sake of it? Or did they maybe have a touch of warmth added to offset the occaisional brightness of early digital recordings? Taking it a bit further... now that digital recording has somewhat come of age, compensation on playback is no longer necessary.
In the bedroom rig I have the first Resolution Audio product. I recall it was their Masters thesis while at MIT. It has the UltraAnalogue DAC chip in it. It provides excellent sound for a 20 something year old DAC.
I also have a 20 year old DAC with the UltraAnalog DAC chips in it. Sounds very good indeed and quite musical
This is exactly what I don;t want in a DAC. I actually didn't like any of the initial tube CD players on the market because they all seemed to me to be distortion generators (in fact I didn;t like many of the tube amps I heard either and still don;t care for a number of them). They MIGHT help a system with bright speakers I suppose but the problem is adding "warmth" or adding a softness will effect every recording.
Now sure I might take this over a lot of gear that is ear bleedingly bright and which also doesn;t seem to go away regardless of recording but I'd prefer the discs to be presented as is - the system that will sound bright with bright recordings and mush with mush recordings and will present a soundstage THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS big when it's on the disc and "tis" big when that is the way it was recorded.
There is a difference to me with properly executed tube gear (ie new tube amplifiers from good manufacturers) where the tube isn;t being used as a mushing distortion buffer and one that is actively engaged in the circuit.
A good SET amp will be dead quiet, will have pin drop fast bass and treble extension of a SS amplifier - what it doesn't do is sound gritty and grainy and "processed" and "fake" and "thin" and lacks a sens of the hall ambiance. I directly compared Bryston to an 8 watt Audio Note amp a decade ago ( I was a SS guy and ready to buy Bryston). I played classical music and listened to a Barber piece "Adagio for Strings" (better known as the theme from Platoon). The bass was deeper on the Audio Note for a start (better power supplies and transformers despite the blathering about watts). The treble extension was just as extended but the violin upper notes didn;t have any artificial "fuzz" surrounding the note. It is not evident if all you audition is SS and Bryston. It IS noticeable and very much so when you directly A/B the amplifiers. I want the note and only the note not the note with some sort of echofuzz crap along with it. It was "brighter" which to inexperienced ears may seem like "more treble" but in fact it is noise and the SET amp went just as high in frequency without the grunge.
And you could actually hear the hall - which you could not hear via the Bryston. Interestingly, you could hear it all better on the AN at a much lower volume level - with the Bryston you had to keep cranking the volume with the hopes that it would come through better.
So in spite of the fact that I was there to buy Bryston Separates with a 20 year warranty and good build and easy to sell later and 150 watts per channel and raved about press and excellent measured response and (that I'm Canadian) I elected to buy an 8 watt tube integrated amp with average build quality with only 1 year warranty from a no name company (to me back then). And I play trance, techno, pop, hard rock, metal, as well.
The same comparison with the AN K/SPE versus Paradigm's best standmount and B&W's 805 followed. The supposed superiority of metal drivers and tweeter on top both just blared "metal tweeter over here" at me. Again noise in the treble (break-up) and the K just frankly embarrassed the hell out of them on acoustic instruments like the piano. Halfway through Moonlight Sonata and those speakers dropped off the list instantly.
But I have also heard the mushy distortion boxes over the years and not been impressed. The Ack! - meh, older tube amps from Copland - blegh and the ST70 eesh WTF? I bought the Solid State Rotel preamp 1585 or whatever over the ARC SP(something) tube preamp - eesh that preamp SUUUUUCKED - muddy has hell.
The big problem with tubes is the HUGE variance from one end of the spectrum to the other. Audio Note DAC's can sound shockingly Shrill - no one would ever call them "warm" (see above review). They are absolutely NOT the DAC to buy if you want to make a bright system sound warm. You could add a Rega Planet if you want that - and it is SS.
If you haven't heard a DAC with an UltraAnalog chipset then you haven't heard the best commercially available ladder DAC. It sounds really, really good. Very high resolution but with natural tone and great dynamics...really surprised me because I bought for a VERY reasonable price.
My experience does not support that theory. Regardless of the music I listen to with the NOS DAC, it just sounds very natural. Be it a symphony, a piano sonata, classical guitar, Miles Davis jazz, blues, rock, etc, the NOS DAC delivers a natural playback that is very much like a high end analog master recording.
On a very few DVD Audio/SACD recordings, a slight improvement in some areas of music reproduction is noted with the SABRE 9018 DAC’s, but even that is subject to debate.
Makes one wonder why most DAC manufactures use oversampling (low cost?). I did read on one of the university websites that to make a proper DAC and filter, there is some cost involved, and oversampling was a cheap method to work around the non-linearity issues encountered when designing a DAC.
"What this country needs is a good 5 watt amplifier!" (Paul Klipsch)
Not only is an digital anti-image interpolation filter (oversampling, as it's often simply called) less costly than an analog anti-image filter, it performs much better as well.
_
Ken Newton
That the cheaper oversampling DAC chips are a form of "mild" fraud.
Regarding the Metrums, I suspect what you may gain over yours is dynamics and resolution, I'm not sure. But I do love my Octave.
I think that R2R is part of the cost of the properly made DAC chips also.
Well, the Wavelength, IIRC, sold for about $3000 new, ten years ago or so (hardly vintage, though it uses some older technologies)
That's about $5000 in today's dollars. If you can't get a good sounding DAC for $5000, there's something wrong with the world.
But seriously, 95% of the products out there are mass produced for an audience who can't afford much more than a few hundred for a DAC, outboard or not.
It all has to do with filtering, input sample rate handling, oversampling, and the need to be compatible, the need to be mass produced, etc.
It is very difficult to get a DAC sounding right when it has to accept every input stream, every input sample rate, be under $1000, etc.
These days a DAC has to be an input switcher, a headphone amp, a preamp, blah blah, and if it doesn't have these features, won't sell because the competition has those features, etc.
The Wavelength has only USB input, IIRC. It uses proprietary coding on the USB input, I think. The rest, the tubes, transformers, power supply, etc., are not designed to be mass produced. Very few bother to spend so much on a DAC alone. The nonoversampling itself is only a small part of the solution. You can get a oversampling DAC to sound that good too, if you use all that nice hardware and get it right at the analog output stage.
Still, your question is a good one. The industry is too busy trying to solve every problem at once and make swiss army knife products at low prices, to get stuff really sounding good. AND the big companies have to keep changing formats to keep up with patent expirations. So HDMI, BlueRay, SACD/DSD, blah blah, none of which inherently improves sound.
Sony could have made a great sounding external DAC if it wanted to, but they're not interested in splitting up the digital signal chain because it allows the competitors to copy everything. They're also arguably not interested in really good digital sound, so that you go out and buy the latest and greatest in the hope of getting something good, only to be disappointed. That's what keeps audiophiles going in the marketplace, for better or for worse.
But seriously, one can buy a universal DVDCDSACDBluRay player for less than a $100. It'll output all formats to your TV and stereo system. But you didn't really expect that machine to sound exceptional, do you? There are limits. Think about all that technology, more than was able to be dreamed about 40 years ago, in one little box for that little money. All I can say is, it's a loss leader. And we pay for the loss every time we 'upgrade' to something 'better'
Cheers
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