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Re: Experience in Modifying Audio Alchemy Dac

Posted by tvr2500m (A) on February 10, 2007 at 16:49:28

In Reply to: Experience in Modifying Audio Alchemy Dac posted by Mpoes on February 1, 2007 at 12:03:11:

A blast from the past. I have an AA DDE 3.0/DTI Pro 32/Monolithic MPS set up. It has the full boat of Channel Islands updates/upgrades/mods. I've just recently been listening back through the DACs and jitter filters I still have lying around. These are what have remained after listening through lots of different DACs and jitter filters. I'd describe the sonics of this AA set up, even with the CIA mods, as mpoes does:

"I always liked its sound in that it was very natural, coherent, and somewhat warm. Always had great bass weight and extension. However, it could also sound woolly, be overly diffused in the stage area, lacked resolution, and appeared to lack good extension."

I also have a Channel Islands Audio VDA-1 DAC/VAC-1 PS combo (I've stuffed this DAC with Black Gates, fit a high-quality, milled DIP socket to be able to sample different op amps, and installed a discrete high-speed/soft recovery diode bridge), a large, heavy, tube buffered, once-pricey Sonic Frontiers SFD-1 MkII, and an MDHT Sound Labs Kusunoki-inspired TDA1543 non-oversampling/filterless DAC.

Listening through all of these again, I found that I was really wanting much more tonal weight from all of the DACs, except the non-os/filterless DAC. The DDE 3.0 was next best in tonal weight and texture, but it was otherware as mpoes describes.

The Sonic Frontiers and Channel Islands had loads of detail, were smooth, had quiet backgrounds, and good soundstaging and imaging, but were, at least to my ears, thin, thin, thin. Really lacking in tonal heft and weight. The component upgrades brought lots of refinement to the CIA DAC, but it still sounds thin. The Sonic Frontiers offers up the strongest semblance of a 3D soundstage image, but it is also tonally light, and more so in the bass than any of the other DACs I have. I've felt that so many DACs fall into this thin camp.

As a further divergence from the main topic, I also revisted HDCD playback with the Sonic Frontiers and AA gear. I found these HDCD to be interesting at first. Listening more, though, I found the presentation of all the dozen or so HDCDs I have to be similarly peculiar. Nice punch, clarity, good top to bottom extension, etc. But it sounded contrived and unnatural. I found it interesting that the sonics through the HDCD processing was more similar between the two DACs than the same two DACs sounded on standard Redbook.

Back on track... So you think you can get really good results with the old DDE 3.0?

- SJ

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