Very interesting thread. I am leaning towards buying one myself for myself , I know it is a silly question::: but, anyone compared this dac to any other brand name device? I am looking at wyred dac1, do you guys think this one will sound close to that? Any thoughts? So far I was only using cd players. And pure I-20.
The wyred uses a DAC that appeared after the Wolfson peaked, so on that basis alone I would expect it to edge out the object of this thread. If you like to experiment and tweak, spend less and have fun. If every other component in your chain is of ESS quality and you primarily listen, you may prefer the wyred. Please consider that I still favor the BB1704, ancient by comparison with either.
yes, perhaps thats true, but i think you will find a lot of that is because it takes a whole new skillset to make the most of the ESS dac and the designers will have spent a long time getting the most out of the wolfston filters. expecting a fairly poorly/cheaply designed and implemented ebay wolsfton to compete with a top of the line implementation, let alone the es9018 is a bit of a stretch no matter what shiny parts you throw it it. yes you can make a reasonable sounding dac by making a few well chosen mods to these type of boards and get good value for money, but since layout is always compromised in the process of these mods, expecting to turn the duck into a swan is bound for failure IMO
well every spec is better yes, but whether its better for you or not, really depends on how you personally define better, asking questions like that wont get you very far, everyone has an opinion.
IMO yes its considerably better, but you couldnt drop it into a simple circuit like the one in this thread and expect it to perform
IMO yes its considerably better, but you couldnt drop it into a simple circuit like the one in this thread and expect it to perform
Analog doesn't have pre-ringing, the ESS does, the Wolfson properly setup doesn't but I am sure there is probably a means to bypass the asrc on the ESS and not have pre-ringing.
And I think your question contains the word "faithful" the definition here is still up in the air. As qusp said there is more to it than the chip, see hifidino's website if you are interested in what is involved in software control of these DAC's which is completely overlooked with the ebay boards.
On a positive note these boards can be a starting point to a nice time-consuming rewarding and expensive project.
Thanks for the clarifications. I am thinking of trying my hand at a WM874X project, and the software control options of the Opus DAC is what I was thinking of tackling. But I would like to think that the end result will sound far better than buying a ready made DAC of a similar price,and not be inferior to the ESS option sound wise. It is a major undertaking on my part, so I would like to get me decisions right before the cash starts flowing 
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I have heard both the wolfson 4.0 and the Wyred4Sound.
If you want me to simplify the differences; The wolfson sounds very much like a "normal" delta sigma dac. It is smooth, it is detaied, it is reasonably polite, it does not do anything wrong. The Wyred4Sound is bold and dynamic, can be a bit sibilant, a bit rough, but also has tremendous detail. They are two very different sounding beasts.
Yes, it up sampling to 192Khz. For details, see below: this is the version with balanced output.
DAC
I recently picked up a used version of this DAC on Ebay and noticed something as I was taking it apart. The same thing can be seen in the last picture of the very first post in this thread, that is, it appears that there is no mains earth connection to the chassis (the earth pin on the power connector is not connected to anything). Isn't this a significant safety concern? Have any of you guys connected it yourself? If so, have you also connected one point of the signal/PCB ground to this same chassis-earth ground point?
-Dan
-Dan
As the DAC is running in low volt DC, it is not necessary to connect the chassis with the mains earth. The only part that have to be connected to the mains earth is the mains transformer and that had been done.
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