Light Harmonic's Geek Wave: the Best Portable DAC & music player yet?

[jeremya]

Light Harmonic just kicked off their latest IGG campaign for the Geek Wave, a portable music player with serious chops.

• Plays just about everything (32/384, DXD128, etc.) -- should give the iPods, AKs, and Ponos of the world a run for their money.
• SDXC card slot (for up to 2TB of expansion)
• User-replaceable battery pack
• Proprietary "Duet Engine" (featured first in their Da Vinci DAC) for getting better sound out of your compressed and CD-quality music files without up-sampling.

Check it out!

As an aside, I recently received a Geek Out 1000 (from their first crowd-funding campaign) and it's an awesome little device. Easily the best sounding DAC I've got. Totally usurped my Meridian Explorer and my AQ Dragonfly. I even prefer it to my $5,000 Anthem.

 

[Elberoth]

It will have to face some serious competition:

http://www.whathifi.com/news/astell-kern-unveils-new-ak240-portable-audio-player-at-ces

 

[jeremya]

Thanks for the link on the new AK, Adam!

First impressions:

* only 64GB of expansion?
* DSD support - excellent!
* dual Cirrus DACs? Cool! (But in the realm of DAC ICs, I usually prefer the ESS Sabre chip that LH is using in theirs).
* that thing appears to be an ergonomics nightmare! Sharp corners and wicked angles protruding from the case? Good luck putting that in your pants pocket!

 

[cat6man]

hard to be best yet with spring 2015 estimated delivery

 

[jeremya]

hard to be best yet with spring 2015 estimated delivery

Ah, but it could be the best yet [to come]. =)

 

[awsmone]

I note in the ad it places DSD 64 and 128 at considerably higher resolution than pcm 384khz

This is infact inaccurrate and misleading

 

[jeremya]

Not sure I follow. Where does it claim that DSD64 is "considerably higher" resolution than 32/384? I see many references that both formats are supported, but I'm not able to find that specific claim anywhere.

For what it's worth, what does it matter anyway? PCM and DSD are very different beasts. I think DSD, while considerably smaller bit-wise, resolves to analog more musically than PCM tends to in equivalently priced DACs.

On the other hand, DXD is a "lower" PCM resolution than 32/384 and I think it sounds fabulous with a capable DAC, but I still prefer DSD64, all things being equal. At the end of the day, the "format war" is fairly moot - production values and mastering provenance are far more critical to the sound of a recording than the encoding scheme, and they are far more difficult to come across in the growing glut of hi-res download services.

 

[awsmone]

On the link provided it has a graph
This graph shows dsd128 as higher than PCM 384

I think it does matter for people not so much in the know
It should be honest

Dsd is different from PCM but not higher resolution
This is what graph implies to my way of thinking

 

[jeremya]

Oh, I see it now... Yeah, I suppose depending on how you view it that it could be misleading to some people.

You're correct that putting DSD on the same axis as PCM is a conflation, however I think the point of the infographic was not to assert that DSD is "higher resolution" than PCM, but to say "hey, we do PCM at any current rate, *and* any current DSD rate, too. And our competition doesn't even do DSD natively in a portable player." At least, that's how I read the graphic.