Of course, to offer a range of filters, each one of them optimized in its own range of application, versus a one-for-all solution, is what I'd consider the contrary of a technical compromise.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
State-of-the-Art Digital
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Of course, to offer a range of filters, each one of them optimized in its own range of application, versus a one-for-all solution, is what I'd consider the contrary of a technical compromise.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
Of course, to offer a range of filters, each one of them optimized in its own range of application, versus a one-for-all solution, is what I'd consider the contrary of a technical compromise.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
Sure, you can see it that way
.
You are missing the point of the DCS filters. They have several user selected filters, that users can select according to their preferences. Nothing related to what we were directly addressing.
But it is nice to know you are studying the DCS docs, we never know!
??? Sorry, I am not understanding. But I am in shock after having read the complete subjective review of the Atlantis Reference by Robert Hartley in TAS ... Curiously he refers to the great sounding DACs he has reviewed in the past , but no reference to the YGGY. Curiously an acquaintance of mine who listened to it in our distributor used similar expressions (but in portuguese, surely) to describe its main characteristics some months ago.
I must sincerely congratulate you on such tenacity. Being an assumed audiophile I know I will never be able to say the same about any high-end component!
I have the same modi multibit dac I use for my office system.. $250 and a Magni 3+ For $99. They replaced a much more expensive Grace setup I was using.
The Schiit was just more musical, yet still very detailed, IME.
They make great holiday gifts too.. All made in California using discrete components locally sourced. Pretty tough challenge, And quite an accomplishment Considering overseas competition.
Thank you, Francisco. This has little to with tenacity, and all with satisfaction.
Being an assumed audiophile I know I will never be able to say the same about any high-end component!
Being an audiophile is great, but at some point it takes a back seat for me once my wishes of reproduction as a music lover are fulfilled. My last major component upgrade was one and a half years ago (Octave HP 700 preamp), and with it everything fell into place. The more recent acquisition of an Empirical Audio re-clocking system, for the signal from CD transport, was a relatively minor expense and just the icing on the cake. Some unexpected major improvements have come from changes in setup (at a cost of either zero or a few dollars here and there), and I am still tweaking.
Yet I don't seriously see equipment changes on the horizon anymore. For my medium sized room and budget I have found an optimum. When I heard other systems in the past, I was inspired to pursue better, now it's just fun for me but I am satisfied with my own system.
I am also not into switching gear for changes in flavor. That certainly be lots of fun, but I am not the type of guy who seeks that out.
The system can play ALL music well. Some at an incredible level, some less convincingly yet still on a high level -- and all to great personal satisfaction.
I am at a point where I know that in my situation and room certain advantages could only be bought with compromises and drawbacks elsewhere, which just does not interest me, at all. I know the great strengths of my system, which are a constant source of joy, and can easily overlook the few weaknesses.
You said you would be moving your system into a large space, which you posted a photo of. That is entirely different.
Yes, yes, we all understand that DCS is primarily a measurements driven company. An Engineer's engineers company. Except most of the companies that went down that road over the decades never made the best sounding gear. Reducing distortions by any means possible has been shown not to be a great strategy by listeners. It invariably creates new sonic issues.
I have heard the latest and greatest low distortion amplfiers (and not so low distortion amplifiers) and they probably sound better than horrible sounding earlier designs (heard plent of those too and owned several 90s SS until I moved forever to tubes) but that doesn't mean they have solved the fundamental problems I heard with the horrible sounding ones...they have just managed to make it a bit more palatable. I agree that they can still make it measure great but I don't agree with your top sound quality assessment. Better than before is not the same as top sound quality... Which transistor amps are in your mind living up to your claim of great measurements and great sound??
It is not to say though that I hate the transistor per se. However, the only time I have heard the transistor sound reasonably good was in a single ended hybrid amps that I had from NAT and KR Audio. In the NAT, the output is a single big Mosfet that is regulated (yes a regulated output stage...highly unusual) by another huge Mosfet. Enormous heat sinks and massive power supply for a very simple circuit (no feedback). Input and driver were tube. KR Audio did it the other way around with transistor input and driver (again super simple single elements) and huge output tubes. The KR was probably better overall, especially if you had senstive speakers but the NAT could get crazy psychadelic good sounding after 2+ hours of play time (ultimately why I sold it). My problem is mostly with implementation and that hasn't really changed much since Bongiorno came up with a few nifty tricks in the 70s.
Please don't quote Soulution ad copy to me...I find their stuff nearly impossible to listen to. Yes, their measurements are impeccable but the sound...well I would rather have a Devialet...and if you know how much I dislike the Devialet you would understand that is saying a lot. For Soulution to talk about richness and tonal shading is, frankly, laughable.
A lot of SS makers turned away from ueber measurements towards relative simplicity (darTZeel is a good example), where measurements are so-so to even somewhat poor. I find it educating to read reviews of tube amps from MF where he is comparing then to his big Darts. The sound characteristics he describes tells me the SS/ tube differences are alive and well. Perhaps the edges have been sanded off a bit but the fundamental character remains.
The DCS ring-dac is some kind of 5-bit hybrid that is something part ladder and something part sigma-delta. And yes, they use a ton of processing to make it work correctly...no chance for a NOS DAC there...
I cannot control what is done int he studio for the recordings...all I can do is try to minimize the damage on the way out...
Most of the classic older jazz and classical recordings didn't have a single ADC in sight...they were still coming in the future... Tube based analog tape recorders and tube microphone preamps were the order of the day.
I have an interesting LP (not so much from the music itself as I find that a bit pedestrian) where in the liner notes they talk about the recording session. They actually recorded it on 4 different types of recorders. 1) A 1-inch analog R2R tape deck 2) A 1/2 inch analog R2R tape deck 3) A Nagra 24 bit digital recorder that was commonly used in movie production sound track recording and 3) A 16/48 DAT .
Which one do you think the musicians and the engineers decided to go with for making the LP (and I assume cd as well but they don't mention that)? Hint: it wasn't digital. It was actually the 1/2 inch tape that they felt sounded the best and I have to say the sound quality of the recording itself is superb...just not that interesting musically.
Fortunately DCS answered your doubts - I just have to quote, not type : dCS | Only The Music www.dcsltd.co.uk " 'Measurements in Digital Audio’.
But I am very happy they are an engineers company - I have an extremely positive opinion on engineers and their work and feel very happy they contribute enormously to our hobby. They have been involved in military electronics and professional audio engineering before going in the high-end - a good signal for me. BTW, many of the cheered founders of the modern audio industry were great engineers.
Engineers do not reduce distortions only - they optimize technical audio parameters to create great sounding systems. This optimization can include minimization, as wisely explained by some designers. Did you ever notice that a good definition of engineering should always includes the idea of "with judgment"?
Quoted from the DCS site:
"However, both reviewers and consumers can often find themselves focusing on one number that, in reality, doesn’t actually tell you very much about the musicality of that particular hifi
component. This is because you can get widely different products in terms of how they operate but with very similar scores. For example a THD+N of .003% on two boxes from different manufacturers might persuade you that they sound the same, but in fact their sound may be polar opposites."
"Listening is the only true litmus test. It’s hard to explain in words just what the feeling of hearing right into a recording is like – the eerie sense of being there at the studio desk as the final multi-track is mixed down to stereo. Many people have the confidence to trust their ears; reading hi-fi magazine reviews is a good way to get people to listen to dCS equipment, but ultimately it isn’t other people’s opinions that count, but your own…
That’s not to say that technical performance isn’t key. People often talk about things in terms of, ‘which is more important – measurements or listening?’ To dCS, this is a false opposition. The company ethos is that technical correctness is essential; there’s no getting around the fact that if a product scores poorly in terms of distortion, signal-to-noise ratio, stereo separation and so on, then it simply cannot deliver the musical goods. Yet that’s just the start; dCS products are carefully – and repeatedly – auditioned during the development process. The senior design engineers know how technical measurements correlate to subjective sound quality; there’s a very complex relationship there and it requires great skill and experience to get the balance right. Understandably, there’s a lot of confusion over this."
(end of quote?
I hope you are not confuse anymore!
OK, you are just telling us about your preferences - I respect them. We have owners of Soulution, Devialet and Datrzeel on this forum and they have posted about them - we have alternative sources of opinion.
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What is to point of these lines? Tell us you have a mysterious LP that we do not know about and will never listen to?
And no, the dCS DAC is not " something part ladder " at all - it is the opposite of it!
I used to quip about dCS (as an early customer I feel entitled to do so) that they took the state-of-the-art radar (that's how the RingDAC originally came into existence) they designed for the Royal Airforce (needless to say, no audio-dedicated company would ever have the budget to design a discrete ADC/DAC board that's neither a PCM R2R ladder nor a Delta-Sigma DSD DAC, but their own brainchild, even if it superficially looks like the former and is able to perform PDM modulation like the latter) and threw an SPS and OpAmps at it. I'm exaggerating, of course, their first consumer product, the Elgar actually had a discrete output stage. I remember thinking (if not telling anyone including the good people at dCS), for years, they should either make the platform available or hire someone to build a power supply and output stage worthy of the concept. 99% of all audiophile DACs out there are built around off the shelf chip sets, and the one company that, back in the era, had built a state-of-the-art discrete converter board from the bottom up, couldn't come up with anything better than to use off-the-shelf SPS and OpAmps? In the meantime of course, they design and build (virtually) everything in-house, real Class A output stages, even building parts such as winding their own toroidal transformers etc. I'd bet that the differences in sound quality between their current models, i.e. Bartok, Rossini and Vivaldi, have more to with parts quality and selection, PSU and output stage, than the differences between the respective converter boards, processing algorithms etc.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
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A popular misunderstanding: the first time I saw one of their converter boards twenty or so years ago, that's what I thought, too. An R2R ladder's resolution (and of course, noise floor) depends on the precision of the resistors (that's why the handful that offer great resolution are so expensive), which is exactly what the RingDAC manages to avoid, including problems such as temperature, parts age etc.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
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An explanation of the Ring DAC concept is found in Robert Harley's review of the original dCS Vivaldi stack. Since the new TAS website apparently does not yet give access to the full review, I have attached it, downloaded from their old website a few years ago. The explanation is on page 10. I have to say, it's a brilliant DAC design, at least that seems obvious to me when I read the explanation.
I was never confused but perhaps DCS is? They talk out of both sides of the mouth at the same time with their ad copy. It is obvious if you read it carefully.Fortunately DCS answered your doubts - I just have to quote, not type : dCS | Only The Music www.dcsltd.co.uk " 'Measurements in Digital Audio’.
But I am very happy they are an engineers company - I have an extremely positive opinion on engineers and their work and feel very happy they contribute enormously to our hobby. They have been involved in military electronics and professional audio engineering before going in the high-end - a good signal for me. BTW, many of the cheered founders of the modern audio industry were great engineers.
Engineers do not reduce distortions only - they optimize technical audio parameters to create great sounding systems. This optimization can include minimization, as wisely explained by some designers. Did you ever notice that a good definition of engineering should always includes the idea of "with judgment"?
Quoted from the DCS site:
"However, both reviewers and consumers can often find themselves focusing on one number that, in reality, doesn’t actually tell you very much about the musicality of that particular hifi
component. This is because you can get widely different products in terms of how they operate but with very similar scores. For example a THD+N of .003% on two boxes from different manufacturers might persuade you that they sound the same, but in fact their sound may be polar opposites."
"Listening is the only true litmus test. It’s hard to explain in words just what the feeling of hearing right into a recording is like – the eerie sense of being there at the studio desk as the final multi-track is mixed down to stereo. Many people have the confidence to trust their ears; reading hi-fi magazine reviews is a good way to get people to listen to dCS equipment, but ultimately it isn’t other people’s opinions that count, but your own…
That’s not to say that technical performance isn’t key. People often talk about things in terms of, ‘which is more important – measurements or listening?’ To dCS, this is a false opposition. The company ethos is that technical correctness is essential; there’s no getting around the fact that if a product scores poorly in terms of distortion, signal-to-noise ratio, stereo separation and so on, then it simply cannot deliver the musical goods. Yet that’s just the start; dCS products are carefully – and repeatedly – auditioned during the development process. The senior design engineers know how technical measurements correlate to subjective sound quality; there’s a very complex relationship there and it requires great skill and experience to get the balance right. Understandably, there’s a lot of confusion over this."
(end of quote?
I hope you are not confuse anymore!
OK, you are just telling us about your preferences - I respect them. We have owners of Soulution, Devialet and Datrzeel on this forum and they have posted about them - we have alternative sources of opinion.
And you are just telling us your preference for DCS...plenty of alternative opinions about them here as well.
I will find you the name at some point...once I can be bothered to dig it out. Then it won’t be so mysterious.What is to point of these lines? Tell us you have a mysterious LP that we do not know about and will never listen to?
And no, the dCS DAC is not " something part ladder " at all - it is the opposite of it!
well it is not single bit like all sigma/delta designs. To the best of my knowledge it is something like 5 bit.
All great and some love the result and others...less so. Just because a company conquers RADAR doesn’t mean it can do audio better than others. It means they will likely have a complex solution because RADAR of that type probably required a complex solution rather than a simple solution perfectly executed.
I cannot comment on the Vivaldi because I have only heard it briefly at shows, but earlier DCS was not SOTA sound IMO. SOTA technical for sure...sound quality? Nope not buying it.
I don't have any subscription, so don't get to read many reviews, but I do remember reading Harley's description of the sound of the Vivaldi as (paraphrasing) making a piano sound like a piano etc., saying to myself, now look here, a critic who expects from a component what I want in an audio system (in contrast, ironically, to so many audiophiles who expect an audio system to produce something other if not "better" than reality).
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
Stereophile flat out calls the Ring DAC in th Elgar a 5-bit unitary weighted resistor ladder DAC (High speed latched switching metal film resistors) running at 64fs oversampling. It had a true measured resolution of around 20 bits.
Vivaldi I read mixed info. Stereophile says it is an improved ladder type but Tone magazine says it is using a FPGA...perhaps they refer to the digital filters?
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