yea the timbre is off.
it’s not natural.
i don’t know how to put it.
all ESS DACs have this weird top end. Around 1khz and up.
throws everything off.
it gives instruments no breadth
Had a Benchmark DAC-3 too. Soundstage was forward and towards the middle. It used SRC4392 to upsample everything to 24/192 (actually a little higher than 192 -- maybe it 211kHz?). After the upsampling was a custom filter in FPGA, then into the dac chip with ASRC still enabled, but DPLL_Bandwidth set to a low number. Harmonic distortion compensation was hand calibrated for each unit. Topping D90 was preferred over DAC-3, even though there were some audible problems with the Topping at vocal frequencies and higher.
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all I know and if you remember it had amazing low end detail.
but besides that yes it was forward and flat
and the timbre was off from the midrange up.
not as much as the Topping D90SE I tried.
that one was horrible.
the benchmark DAC3 I at least had some enjoyment with. Would put it in and out of my system.
amazingly the topping D30pro which uses the Cirrus flagship chip was insanely better than the D90SE.
CS43198=43131 uses some cheating to deceive the AES17 DR test, as told me ESS design-team member. That's why the THD+N -115db of this DAC is rather typical for the DR <120db(A), i.e. way worse than claimed 130db(A). The DAC switches its gain dynamically, the same way as ES9281 does if "Dynamic Range Enhancement" option is On.
As the thread starter I have to agree with Jan. The problem is that many dac related threads end up as arguments over subjective opinions about sound. And this thread is not even about dacs but adc.
It started with facts and figures then degenerated into personal preferences and unsubstantiated claims.
Ohh well.
Jan
Unfortunately with low output impedance switched resistor dacs, filtering the dac outputs before the I/V op amp to prevent overload tends to increase distortion due to dac internal CMOS resistor nonlinearity. Sometimes a little bit of filtering there can be the lesser evil though.
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