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

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Re: Pass Labs D1 DAC Volume Control?

Posted by the_stranger (A) on November 6, 2006 at 00:28:20

In Reply to: Pass Labs D1 DAC Volume Control? posted by jerry xyz on November 5, 2006 at 11:36:12:

I pined for a D1 for years before an example with the 24/96 upgrade turned up on Audiogon. I paid a lot, but haven't regretted a second spent with it.

I replaced a Benchmark DAC1 with it. Not even the same ballpark, the Benchmark sounds like a cheap toy in comparison, especially if you're using the volume control on the Benchmark.

The volume control on the Pass D1 is analogue. However some have noted that the top end can be a bit recessed when the volume is below 11-o-clock. This is pretty darn loud in my system. I usually run it wide open with a X2 in the way for source switching...

I will note that even with the volume wide open, the balanced outputs sound considerably better than unbalanced - so much so, that when listening on my Grado RA1/RS1 headphone setup, which uses unbalanced input and has its own volume control, I use the tape outputs of the X2, rather than the RCA outputs of the D1...

It is an ridiculously revealing dac, with no personality whatsoever. Want to know exactly what your transport sounds like? What about your digital cable. Heck, changing the power cable on the transport reveals noticable shifts in sonic character.

The AT&T ST optical input is something else... incredible midrange detail from my Sonic Frontiers SFT-1, but loses a lot of low and high end extension compared to AES/EBU.

My Parasound C/BD-2000 sounds very warm and analogue, incredible "air" around instruments, pinpoint imaging... in stark contrast to the SFT-1, which is hyper detailed but not much else. Micromega Drive 2 is somewhere in between, sort of a jack of all trades, master of none.

The point is component matching becomes really important, this dac really doesn't have anything in the way of its own character, but if you like the sound of your transport and want it to shine through, this is a great unit.

Wayne Colburn at Pass Labs, who designed this DAC, with some assistance from Nelson Pass on the innovative I/V stage, has said in an e-mail to a gentleman I was corresponding with whom was considering a D1 that he thinks "...it is still competative but maybe not cost effective.  The Marantz SA-11 CD player is very good on SACD and redbook.  Three people here [at Pass Labs] still use D1's  two of us use Marantz."

Good luck!
--jeff

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