$43000 "hi-end" DAC vs $50 consumer audio dac ?

[qusp]

nobody is saying having 26bits is essential except them.... but then they fail completely to get anywhere near it.

[nattonrice]

They can charge what ever they want, they are a commercial entity and most definitely not a charity.

Unless they are breaking any laws, they are also free to spin any line of technical bollocks they wish.

What on earth does this have to do with diy audio?

[overtheairbroadcast]

Originally Posted by nattonrice

They can charge what ever they want, they are a commercial entity and most definitely not a charity.

Unless they are breaking any laws, they are also free to spin any line of technical bollocks they wish.

What on earth does this have to do with diy audio?

You are right -- free markets, corporations, economic theory, etc....

You are still right -- even free speech having nothing to do with technology has proven this to be true.

Not sure about this one, but I am sure you will be proven wrong somehow .

[harshtimez]

New here but long time viewer.

The DAC chip doesn't mean little unless you have it surrounded with the right components.

But it is good for thebrich guys to get s@ckered into buying these as they do help a lot of audio companies R&D less expensive components. I'd take one for free and sell it and buy a Weiss and EAR Integrated.

[qusp]

Originally Posted by nattonrice

They can charge what ever they want, they are a commercial entity and most definitely not a charity.

Unless they are breaking any laws, they are also free to spin any line of technical bollocks they wish.

What on earth does this have to do with diy audio?

irrelevance to DIYA i'll give you
it is an unfortunate problem with the free market that you can just make up ******** and lies to baffle and bamboozle those without the sense of reason to see through it, con them out of their money as a conman would, which IS illegal. but hey we're used to that in all fields, not just audio.

When i'm selling more subjectively leaning products I try not to make technical claims of superiority I cant back up. if you dont do that then hey i'm all good, they can charge what they like.

with this sort of coin, at least buy an Accuphase DC901/D900 (theres your truly high end and high priced ESS dac fast42), at least then you get a transport with some substance and a substantial chassis, not a cheap plastic trayed oppo in a crass case, with an MCU that doesnt seem to always know what samplerate its playing and a 60lb digital stack that still somehow doesnt have enough heatsink to put in a cabinet and a 5k power supply upgrade that produces enough noise that it can be seen in measures of the dac above it....

save the 10k on the clock and buy a nice set of speakers.

fast42: with all the fuss you are making about PSRR over in Scott's Discrete opamp thread i've gotta say i'm surprised at your 'good enough' comments re the PSU, or the blind faith you are showing for a device you havent heard because of some paid reviews and a price tag.

another ESS worth a mention aside from DIY ones is the 7kUSD Calyx FemtoDAC, which seems to be gaining a rep as a bit of a giant killer

[fas42]

Originally Posted by qusp

with this sort of coin, at least buy an Accuphase DC901/D900 (theres your truly high end and high priced ESS dac fast42), at least then you get a transport with some substance and a substantial chassis

Will have a look ...

fast42: with all the fuss you are making about PSRR over in Scott's Discrete opamp thread i've gotta say i'm surprised at your 'good enough' comments re the PSU, or the blind faith you are showing for a device you havent heard because of some paid reviews and a price tag.

The proof's in the pudding, so to speak. The SW-OPA needs to be as good as it can possibly be, so that it can be used anywhere, in any situation, that's a decent aim for such an exercise. It's worth going to some effort to get things as "right" as they possibly they can be at the design stage, when it's the least headache trying to compensate for less than best performance.

So, with the msb, they've focused on areas which have given the best subjective results, and if that's meant less than technically perfect power supplies that's not really important, because it apparently doesn't affect the sound quality. Technical perfection doesn't guarantee "perfect" sound, and I have heard extremely convincing sound from gear that's way short of being "correct".

In simple terms, get something technically as good as you can as a first stage, and if that doesn't do the job for sound quality then you have to pull out your bag of dark arts tricks to get the extra performance. No-one, no matter what they say, at this moment really understands everything that matters for getting top notch sound, and that's just the way it is ...

As for accepting the reports of the msb performance, I've been reading reviews for over 25 years and I can pretty well most times read between the lines, I look for certain key phrases, and the types of reactions of the listeners, to pick whether there is special merit in the component.

Frank

[Trevor White]

Originally Posted by qusp

another ESS worth a mention aside from DIY ones is the 7kUSD Calyx FemtoDAC, which seems to be gaining a rep as a bit of a giant killer

and here's another commercial ESS dac with similar jitter specs and even cheaper price tag Anedio Affordable High-End Audio : High-end USB audio DAC based on ESS Technologies' 32-bit ES9018 DAC

[marce]

It would be interesting to lay out a ES9018 board with all the bells and whistles,get a price for the board and parts and a price for a decent case, just to see what these hings can be designed for.

[overtheairbroadcast]

counter culture, I am not defending the product, but merely defending anything like it. Whether it be over-the-counter drugs (does Echinisia and Cherry extract really work?), cars, running shoes (I think that the kids call them "kicks" nowadays -- whatever the heck that means...), diy audio components, clothing, houses, or audio/video products with more blinky lights than the last version, if there is a free market and there are people willing to purchase a product, then let them.

I am merely defending the game. The game has been going to go on longer than I have ever be here on this planet.

Now, what I don't like too much is the consumerism behind it all. But that is up to the wise man to figure out. Consumption used to be driven by what you need and how you could go about working those hours to make that much money to afford that new item. Now consumerism is driven by a display social status rather than any intrinsic utility of those goods. If those people want to pay that much for maybe what amounts to snake oil, then sure, go ahead I say. The information is out there for the wise man to make an informed choice because maybe if you compare or look at several other manufacturers, you might pick up that they push different criteria, and critical thinking will hopefully help you realize that the electroplated gold on that XLR interconnect is really only adding a sixty-cent value and a nice sheen.


And then there are wise men out there that completely skip the critical thinking process -- maybe it is the bombardment of advertising, fashion magazines, Amway testimonials, "reality" television stars, and the belief of being told that, "if you have this, you have made it in life". Face it, the things like this are excellently hyped (from DACs to running shoes). Look at what they push as various criterias for excellence, and even a smart man might completely forget that any other criteria exist. It is hypnotic and they believe the hype.

Maybe it sounds good to their own ears, better than their last DAC. Things like these are subjective.

Or maybe the wise man with the means who can buy one for every room in his house, also doesn't want to agonize over which DAC they want to get since they're essentially just sand ("sand", hehe, gotta love it), and the value they assign to them is not comparable to the worth of their production. They just buy it.

But it is a fight to know that value of what you are paying for.


tl;dr -- the product is there, I couldn't care less it being there or other liking it, but defend the right to sell it and the right to buy it (it doesn't shoot lasers at kittens does it?), and explain why a wiser man than me might also purchase one or more.

[Ken Newton]

Originally Posted by abraxalito

This post of Bruno's has some relevance when discussing MSB's dynamic range measurements...

An interesting report from Bruno. As poor as the linearity reported by Bruno is, it makes me wonder to what degree msb's subjective (presumably, positive) sound character is due to their discrete converter's distortion level proportionally tracking the signal level, sort of the way open loop class-A gain stages behave. Which, of course, is opposite to the way D/A converters usually behave.