I myself have listened to many different dacs and all of them have about the same specs but the expensive ones tend to sound clearer with less distortion. Is there some other way to measure a dac quality other than price?
If the measurements are the same, the performance is the same. If the measurements differ, then that difference can be audible. About 0.5 dB differences in frequency response can be discerned, and good rule of thumb is that it must have at least 100 dB SNR. Most DACs have performance that is considerably better than this relatively low bar. If you try to compare DACs that require superhuman senses and barely differ under measurement, chances are the effect is placebo or due to errors in test protocol such as not precisely matching the volume.
Only your expectations
Altering sound for better listening experience? I don’t think audiophile DACS are transparent.
Nothing.
I use smsl 9 and 9 pro both sound awesome
Different is often confused with better.
Right,… On that point, so is new and vintage…
Do a a proper and controlled blind test. You’ll see
With all things equal in a system reproducing sounds the way you want, changing the DAC should be materially different for the better of what you value in reproductive sound.
Just listen and determine if there is value to you. I don’t chase perfection. I chase not messing up what I have achieved. I finally have synergy. I can listen for hours knowing it isn’t the most resolving or the biggest stage but just a magic enjoyment. Will I stop looking for more? Of course not.
All this talk about the best DAC is mute to me. There is too much competitive jostling for recognition. Camps form around different preferences. “Mine is better than yours”. Follow your ears and be prudent to your wallet. Somewhere there is a genius electrical engineer but also somewhere is a marketing department trying to part with your money.
The difference is pretty much in the power supply and analog output.
How’s does my node2 rate here?
Listening is a good way to judge how something sounds
I have a couple of entry level ones as part of some headphone amplifiers. The fantastic and portable Oppo HA2, and the Musical Fidelity V90 HPA. Absolute clarity from the Oppo, absolute warmth from the V90.
I’m not a measurements fundamentalist by any means but this article is a good read in so far as it demonstrates measurable differences in DACs.
Interesting to note also that the correlation between price and performance on some of these graphs is, well, variable.
That’s exactly what I needed thanks!
Most better and unfortunately more expensive DACs don’t use cheap delta/sigma, mass produced chipsets that make more economically priced DACs affordable. Prior to the introduction of delta/sigma DAC chipsets, the only DAC conversion chipsets available were those used in high resolution medical imaging and radar systems that required bit-perfect precision.
Delta/sigma DACs employ shortcuts such as interpolation to cut down on the massive processing and power requirements that bit-perfect conversion requires and for most listeners the small trade-offs aren’t all that apparent. Mind you, the first few generations of delta/sigma DAC chipsets were far from ideal. In fact, what’s often referred to as digital glare was because of early delta/sigma DAC chipsets and flaws that Phillips and Sony had made in the decoding process. Thankfully, the latest crop of delta/sigma chipsets used in current DACs have all but eliminated the flaws that plagued early digital conversion and some truly excellent DACs use them.
Brands like dCS, Mola Mola, PS Audio DirectStream, Chord, MSB and Denafrips rely on either bit-perfect, non-interpolating DAC chipsets used in high resolution medical imaging, programmable FPGA chips running proprietary digital conversion software to DACs like mine that uses a discrete R2R resistor ladder network to convert digital files to the analog waveforms we recognize as music. There are literally over a thousand, individual, laser trimmed surface mount resistors on the DAC board. My previous DAC was the internal DAC in my Oppo UDP-205 4K Universal Disc Player which uses the ESS Sabre 9038 Pro chipset. It’s excellent and ruthlessly revealing but my current Denafrips Hermes DDC/Pontus II DAC combo simply sounds far more tangible and real. However, if the recording is shitty or the recording engineer got sloppy, both DACs make it painfully obvious.
Cool thing is you can get a discrete R2R ladder DAC from Denafrips. Both the Ares II and Enyo be had for under $1000. Reviewers lost their minds over them.
Wrong on nearly every point.
Prior to delta-sigma designs there were DACs such as the TDA1640 from the very early 80s marketed as for audio conversion, displays, electron beam recording (I’m reading from the data sheet). These weren’t repurposed medical imaging or radar DACs, they were relatively cheap devices intended for consumer electronics. Delta-sigma massively improved the quality and reduced the price of DACs when it became feasible to build high speed semiconductors cheaply and they displaced pretty much all other DAC designs for audio applications by the early 90s.
‘Digital glare’ typically came from these early multibit DACs which had either limited bith depth (the Phillips TDA1640 is a 14 bit DAC), had poor tolerances in the resistor networks to generate the reference voltages or required very aggressive filtering near the Nyquist frequency which either deadened the sound or allowed high frequency aliases back into the audio spectrum. Or, typically, all of these problems together. These problems pretty much went away for consumer gear with the advent of delta-sigma converters.
If you’re not a fan of interpolation, I have bad news for you. You can infer a bit about how the dCS Ring DAC that you like works by reading their website and looking at the circuit board pictures. They talk about their DAC running at between 2.822 and 6.14MHz which corresponds to 64x oversampling of a 44.1-96kHz signal, and they also talk about it getting fed a 5 bit oversampled PCM from the frontend. Since there are a couple of Xilinx FPGAs in front of the resistor network, it’s a dead cert that this oversampling and the required
interpolationfiltering is happening in software on those chips. The dCS blurb talks about having 48 current sources, which you can see on the photos of the boards (each current source needing two resistors, all doubled up for stereo) which is the resistor and latch network that’s laid out in a 12x16 grid. It absolutely is doing interpolation and it absolutely isn’t using repurposed medical imaging DACs and the dCS (at least) isn’t using thousands of indivdually trimmed resitors.
Ahh shit. Here we go again. Demo some shit and see if you like it. Measurable differences in DACs and amps can be hard to discern. Just enjoy what you want.