Are there any excellent inexpensive Chinese DACs?

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#1,263
tonyEE said:
Anyhow.....

Back to cheap Chinese DACs.

Yesterday we had the WiiM Ultra DAC hooked up in the HT in 2ch mode. It's set up with fixed volume into a 2ch AUX input of the multi channel preamp ( not processor ).

WiiM -> Parasound P7 -> Nuforce MCA20 -> PSB Gold-I

So, at one point I sat down to listen to a song I know quite well, over Tidal, Phil Collins Against All Odds.

The first I noticed was the huge wide soundstage, not all that deep, but almost atmospheric. But the as the song got louder the treble got congested and the voice did get an edge to it. The bass was quite deep and the drum kit was fast with really good transients. However, I don't know if this was the amp or the DAC.

I guess it is a damn good system for movies... I could upgrade it by putting a better class AB amp ( I got a CJ MF2100 in the closet ) for the L/R speakers and add a DAC to the back of the WiiM. But wife really wants me to keep the HT simple ( Actually, I hid the Tablos and Roku and ethernet switch, etc ) and that big gold amp will be hard to hide.

The WiiM Ultra's DAC is OK. I think it will do great for 99.98 % of the population. Indeed, yesterday, the TV was turned off most of the day, with my wife just playing music. She went on a 1980s tear that was awesome. Some of those songs I haven't heard for a lot time...

Duran Duran anyone?

So the little box is making itself very useful. Not bad for an inexpensive Chinese DAC.

I guess to really get a feel for its DAC, I ought to try running its DAC in the other systems where I put as a bridge.... I could easily reach around and reroute the RCA cables.
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Excellent effort👍
But why go over over the hoops and loops with your HT system?
I was thinking more of trying like what you did with your Nitsch sometime ago. The Ultra has SE outputs only just like the Nitsch but you did test by using your SE F6 Semisouth Amp as posted before.

How close is the Ultra compared with the reference Nitsch?
 
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#1,264
^ well..... I got... ahem... FOUR WiiM Ultras now. One for the living room, one for my home office, one for the den (HT) and one for my wife's office.

So, since I was sitting on the couch while she was playing her music, it became convenient to pay attention to the sound quality.

Yes, you are right, I should try the WiiM's DAC into the F6 as well. In that set up it would be easy to compare it with the NItsch. I could do it by plugging the WiiM's DAC into one of the aux inputs of the preamp....

I hope to find out if Nitsch will do balanced outputs. I do have ZM's Iron Pre Bal in the main stereo... that could use the balanced outputs.

Speaking of that F6.... LOL....

Anyhow, back to inexpensive Chinese DACs.
 
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#1,266
tonyEE said:
^ well..... I got... ahem... FOUR WiiM Ultras now. One for the living room, one for my home office, one for the den (HT) and one for my wife's office.

So, since I was sitting on the couch while she was playing her music, it became convenient to pay attention to the sound quality.

Yes, you are right, I should try the WiiM's DAC into the F6 as well. In that set up it would be easy to compare it with the NItsch. I could do it by plugging the WiiM's DAC into one of the aux inputs of the preamp....

I hope to find out if Nitsch will do balanced outputs. I do have ZM's Iron Pre Bal in the main stereo... that could use the balanced outputs.

Speaking of that F6.... LOL....

Anyhow, back to inexpensive Chinese DACs.
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Thanks @tonyEE , all in good time and possibly after consultation with your wife 🙂 understand it is all subjective but will still be very useful
FYI, I usually don’t tell anyone here if I make changes to my system but almost all the time wife finds out that something has changed in the sound and complains if not good enough 🙋‍♀️
 
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#1,269
It is probably horrible at best... Why in the name of logic would you buy a dac like this with many soldering defects and resistors imperfections, most basic latches which lack either technology of the first generation of dac?

with this dac you return to stone age, pre-prototypes. Maybe it has an analogue sound?

For the price maybe it is a value item, but no DEM, not laser trim, no adjustment and perfect settling of temperature drift and control voltages as in IC dacs.
 
#1,270
Yet CMOS IC dacs have their own issues. CMOS resistor nonlinearity, substrate coupled noise, the need for DES/DEM in order to make distortion look like noise, etc. Even for a company like Topping, their top of the line dac today is a discrete resistor FIRDAC; there is no dac chip IC.
 
#1,273
Ciu said:
Kind of treasure hunt ? May be I'm a bit naive ...or just curious ...
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This tells us that USB audio controller manufacturers have reached a level that people like. It is not expensive ComTrue USB - I2S without independent audio-clocks, working onchip PLL with so so power supply but people like it, and this is an indicator. Decided to order similar USB-I2S board for tests and comparing. Already heared USB solutions from Savitech, interesting to know about this ComTrue one.
 
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#1,275
Discrete resistor R2R dacs are gaining more users it seems like. Actually, they are usually "segmented" designs with the more significant few bits thermometer encoded, then R2R used for the lower bits. There are also bipolar multibit designs using an R4R architecture. In addition there are discrete resistor DSD FIRDACs. The latter type are preferred by some people, but other folks seem to like the R2R sound better with its common tendency towards a warm low midrange effect. In most other regards, the DSD dacs probably sound better: Lower distortion, more detailed sound, pretty much better everything except for the slightly more pronounced low midrange sound of R2R. Also, IME in the best discrete resistor DSD dacs the low midrange is also very good, just not exaggerated.
 
#1,278
gabdx said:
I listened to dsd in akm dacs, didn't like it at all.
There are many reviews of how bad dsd sound is, its mostly an archiving format, mastering , not really playable
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First of all, DSD as used in SACD is what is known as DSD64. Double sample rate SACDs were sometimes made later at DSD128. DSD doesn't start to sound really good until you get up to DSD256. Regarding DSD as an archiving format, that is more or less nonsense. Sony did it because it was the best they had at the time. PCM is a better format for almost any and every purpose except for playback in DSD256 dacs. Why? Its just a quirk of the technology and architectural tradeoffs for doing D/A conversion. A CD converted to DSD256 and played back on a really good DSD dac is very hard to beat.
 
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