• Disclaimer: This Vendor's Forum is a paid-for commercial area. Unlike the rest of diyAudio, the Vendor has complete control of what may or may not be posted in this forum. If you wish to discuss technical matters outside the bounds of what is permitted by the Vendor, please use the non-commercial areas of diyAudio to do so.

e18 DAC - 8 channels at 32bit /384 kHz

Status
Not open for further replies.
Jump to Latest
#21
I've been out of the loop for a while, and just saw this. Very interesting since it seems that it might satisfy both my system requirements in 1 shot - 3-way dsp xover speakers plus high-quality headphone listening.

The intro pricing is very attractive - not really all that much more than the exa2UI + BuffIII package I sketched out to handle 8 channels.

Couple questions that didn't seem to be covered by the manual:
- how does the headphone out operate? Does it always get channels 1/2? Are the line outputs muted when the phones are inserted?
- would you forsee any problems with custom IEMs? (JH-13 pro most likely 28 ohms/116db. The obvious concerns are noise, and whether there would be a need for extreme attenuation due to the efficiency which may begin to impact quality.)
- what happens with 2-channel spdif input? Does it go only to ch 1/2, or does it get replicated to all outputs?
 
#22
The headphone amplifier is normally connected to channels 1 and 2. There are jumpers, so you can rewire it to any other channel pair.

The outputs are not muted by the headphone jack. Sorry, you will have to turn off your power amplifier when listening to headphones.

I don't expect any issues with 28 Ohms headphones. Attenuation goes down to -80dB. Mute is I believe -123dB.

SPDIF is always two channels and it is hardwired to channels 1 and 2. This way it is possible to listen to stereo and multichannel sources without switching speakers.

There is one undocumented feature - in USB 2-channel mode channels 1 and 2 are repeated on all outputs. You can connect outputs in parallel, and this will decrease not only the internal noise and distortion of the DAC, but also the noise and distortion from the output stages. The same feature exists in four-channel mode - every channel is repeated twice.

What crossover software are you planning to use?

-Best,

exa065
 
#23
Thanks for the quick response. The channel routing sounds like what I expected - certainly workable, although making sure the wife doesn't crank it with the 'phones connected would require a bit of discipline.

exa065 said:
I don't expect any issues with 28 Ohms headphones. Attenuation goes down to -80dB. Mute is I believe -123dB.
Click to expand...
Probably something that just has to be tried. My concern is just that running at say -50bB might be sub-optimal due to compromised S/N. Easy enough to add something like a Ventus-ez with tweaked gain structure if necessary, I guess.

What crossover software are you planning to use?

-Best,

exa065
Click to expand...

I'm currently using Reaper with some hand-tuned IIR filter via ReaEQ. My plan would be to move to JRMC and the new convolution engine, though. Either of these should work fine through ASIO.
 
#24
Hello

Does the e18's hardware volume control work with ALL playback material, including DSD?

Also, can you please comment on DSD playback using JRiver? Will it work as the Mytek is via DSD bitstreaming using DoP (Wasapi Event-Style selected as playback method)?

Thanks,
Jim
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom