Hey guys. There is a new msb diamond dac. 60k. All options included. Has galaxy clock as well.
Al
Hey guys. There is a new msb diamond dac. 60k. All options included. Has galaxy clock as well.
Al
DAC chip manufacturers (Burr Brown, Philips) have been doing that for almost 30 years.
When Philips debuted the TDA1541 DAC back in the 80s, they were selling it as a regular, S1 (single crown) and S2 (double crown) selection. The later, hand selected from the thousands produced, had progressively lower THD+N figures and came with a big price premium over a standard one.
Same with Burr Brown, who for years have been selling the chips in regular, J and K selection.
MSB, beeing a (discrete) DAC manufacturer as well, can do the same. The question remains though, what production level thay have, as that will have a direct influence on the selection they are able to make (it is easier to find a one very good DAC among 10000 chips available, than among say 10).
I suspect they produce small batches of chips and clocks (100 - 1000) and the variance in the sample is small, so the performance difference between say the best 10% and average will be small. I would be interested in a double blind A/B between the standard and the select version of the Diamond....
DAC chip manufacturers (Burr Brown, Philips) have been doing that for almost 30 years.
When Philips debuted the TDA1541 DAC back in the 80s, they were selling it as a regular, S1 (single crown) and S2 (double crown) selection. The later, hand selected from the thousands produced, had progressively lower THD+N figures and came with a big price premium over a standard one.
Same with Burr Brown, who for years have been selling the chips in regular, J and K selection.
MSB, beeing a (discrete) DAC manufacturer as well, can do the same. The question remains though, what production level thay have, as that will have a direct influence on the selection they are able to make (it is easier to find a one very good DAC among 10000 chips available, than among say 10).
I feel that a manufacturer choosing to use his "rejects" in his own equipment is firing his foot from a marketing point of view.
I wonder why they did not disclose the phase noise (or jitter) figures for the new 'hand selected' clock. They were wery upfront about those figures for Galaxy Femto and Femto 140 clocks (77 and 140fs respectively). Is that 10, 50 or maybe only 75fs ?
I would be VERY surprised if they were able to manufacture a batch of 50 Galaxy Femto Clocks, not to menton 100 or 1000. Still, they can order XO is thousands and measure each and every one (that is what ar-T is doing for other manufacturers).
We also have cases where this selection is not needed, such as UltraAnalog that carried extreme measurements on the DAC and hand trimmed each DAC, or topologies that rely on processing to overcome small manufacturing non accuracies , such as the ring DAC or the 1 bit DAC.
this is a big misrepresentation of what they do. The rejects are out. The units within tolerance / specs are in, and the units with superior specs go into the premium models. Nothing fishy about this practice IMO.
(...) Laser trimming is far more accurate than any 'hand trimming'. And yet - you can still select the better examples out of laser trimmed chips !
You can call it a misrepresentation, but I would never buy an unit using a "non selected" component knowing that the people being able to pay about 40% more get a better unit, specially if the equipment costs above $40k . IMHO, in high-end people can not afford to say openly that some components are just "more in" than others. Perhaps we are misrepresenting the differences between the two units, but it is what their marketing suggests.
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