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Post by rockman85 on Nov 25, 2020 18:32:01 GMT -5
Boomzilla is right on about cheaper DACs and the narrowing gap. As another poster said earlier Topping ( a subset of Shenzenaudio) is a good place to look. I started out using the DAC in my Integra receiver, then moved to an SMSL M100. A compact and capable USB DAC with a modest price tag of $79 at the time. A while after that I moved up the SMSL line to the $249 M300 MKII with balanced outputs. This was a big step forward, not having balanced outputs before. But I had some troubles between that DAC and my computer, but the troubles were more than likely driver related and only gave me hiccups with DSD playback. My 3rd and current DAC which will probably be my last for a long long time is the RME ADI 2 DAC fs. A whole lot of letters for the name, and the biggest price tag of the three at $1149. But it has the cleanest sound, excellent output from low to high voltage, and a feature set which is almost bar none. The 1/4 and IEM headphone output are a bonus and very clean. You can even disable them in the settings and have the unit just be a converter. It does everything perfectly & quietly. These are the only external DACs I have first hand experience with but I've been the most pleased listening to my system with the RME as my outboard converter. Cheers! I have been eyeballing that DAC for a while now, I really like that it has bass and treble controls as well as a loudness feature. How do you like it, do you use the three features I mentioned? The other DAC I have narrowed it down to is the new Matrix Mini-i 3 Pro, it has Airplay 2, is a Roon endpoint and can play MQA (via Roon or USB). Basically its boiling down to whether or not I will miss the tone controls, and also the Mini is cheaper, and I could also sell my streamer too if I got the Mini. |
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Post by leonski on Nov 25, 2020 20:50:12 GMT -5
I'm looking for a MULTIPLE INPUT DAC. At least 2 optical / coax and a USB input.
What qualifies these days?
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Post by metaldaze on Nov 26, 2020 8:28:03 GMT -5
Boomzilla is right on about cheaper DACs and the narrowing gap. As another poster said earlier Topping ( a subset of Shenzenaudio) is a good place to look. I started out using the DAC in my Integra receiver, then moved to an SMSL M100. A compact and capable USB DAC with a modest price tag of $79 at the time. A while after that I moved up the SMSL line to the $249 M300 MKII with balanced outputs. This was a big step forward, not having balanced outputs before. But I had some troubles between that DAC and my computer, but the troubles were more than likely driver related and only gave me hiccups with DSD playback. My 3rd and current DAC which will probably be my last for a long long time is the RME ADI 2 DAC fs. A whole lot of letters for the name, and the biggest price tag of the three at $1149. But it has the cleanest sound, excellent output from low to high voltage, and a feature set which is almost bar none. The 1/4 and IEM headphone output are a bonus and very clean. You can even disable them in the settings and have the unit just be a converter. It does everything perfectly & quietly. These are the only external DACs I have first hand experience with but I've been the most pleased listening to my system with the RME as my outboard converter. Cheers! I have been eyeballing that DAC for a while now, I really like that it has bass and treble controls as well as a loudness feature. How do you like it, do you use the three features I mentioned? The other DAC I have narrowed it down to is the new Matrix Mini-i 3 Pro, it has Airplay 2, is a Roon endpoint and can play MQA (via Roon or USB). Basically its boiling down to whether or not I will miss the tone controls, and also the Mini is cheaper, and I could also sell my streamer too if I got the Mini. I like it very much. It has multiple gain settings along with an auto adjust feature depending on the recorded level of the incoming signal. Which gives you the best signal to noise ratio for many different amps and gain stages, anywhere from a tiny voltage all the up to its maximum output of ~6 Or 7 volts. The loudness control is great when listening later at night and you still want a bit of oomph to the music. And it gives you control over the amount of extra boost you want. I actually don't use the tone controls that often in the digital domain because I have analog tone controls and bass management in my pre amp. However having those controls for the built in headphone outputs is very handy. I suppose it'll be up to how you listen to your music most frequently. I'm not familiar with the DAC you mentioned. But if it performs well & you're streaming 70% of the time or more then that one may suit you better. I don't believe RME has any plans to adapt MQA to their units, but I can't say for sure. |
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Post by metaldaze on Nov 26, 2020 8:58:04 GMT -5
I'm looking for a MULTIPLE INPUT DAC. At least 2 optical / coax and a USB input. What qualifies these days? Beyond your DAC Magic plus? There arent that many options I'm seeing that are as affordable as Cambridge. There's the D90 from topping, but only has 1 of each digital input. All the rest I see are quite pricey. There's the Benchmark DAC3, IFI Pro iDSD, and the very expensive Bryston BDA 3.1 which has 10 discrete inputs. Maybe someone else knows a better multiple digital input DAC for under, say $1,000? |
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Post by leonski on Nov 26, 2020 13:12:06 GMT -5
Cambridge Audio is OFF my Christmas List.
I won't go into details, but I own a DacMagic+ and it needs repair. CA won't part with a schematic......
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Post by metaldaze on Nov 27, 2020 8:15:26 GMT -5
Cambridge Audio is OFF my Christmas List. I won't go into details, but I own a DacMagic+ and it needs repair. CA won't part with a schematic...... That's a beat. I'm sorry to hear that. It looks like a nice piece of gear too. I had a phono pre amp from CA and it was a solid unit. I guess the product is still too new for them to part with the schematic so you can have your unit fixed regarding your situation. I get Doing so to try to maintain their business model, but at the expense of causing ripples in their customer service department. |
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Post by leonski on Nov 27, 2020 15:48:34 GMT -5
Everything they do seems to be Fee Based. NO customer 'service' to speak of.
My CD player needed a firmware update to work properly with an Apple Airport Express I was using as a 'remote' DAC.
It was a known issue.
You'd think that after spending maybe 1300$ on a CD player (top of their line 840) you'd get cut a LITTLE slack. Nope.
Instead? They sent me a FILE for the update. I went and bought the Null-Modem cable (serial cable sort of 'backwards')
File required a specific version of windows.....Win2K professional? XP? I don't remember which
But I chickened out. They would have been NO HELP whatsoever if I had done something wrong with the update and 'bricked'
the player. Too Bad! I liked that player with an ambitious feature set including 2 xtra digital inputs so you could use it as a DAC......
The transport? SAME as was used thruout the entire CA line at the time. A Sanyo, IIRC, from the Azur 340 or whatever on UP.
NO More CA for ME......
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Post by metaldaze on Nov 30, 2020 19:03:31 GMT -5
I'm familiar with null modems from my job and the rather antiquated technology that has to be used to make current machines backwards compatible. It's just silly.
And understandably so. I would not have expected that from a company like them. That seems to go beyond poor customer service and is just like a slap in the face.
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Post by leonski on Dec 1, 2020 0:25:57 GMT -5
I worked in the semiconductor industry from farily (not THE) earliest days. Some of our early furnaces had 8" floppy drives and sounded like a cement mixer has the heads moved and wrote / read.
Poor reliability, too.
Other gear? ALL had proprietary operating systems and keyboards. Virtually all used a Zilog Z80 or was is an 8088 processor? Windows driven stuff came along later. We had a machine in the
fab as late as in the 2000s that ran on Windows NT3.1 or was it 3.11? Frankly, I stayed AWAY from that thing unless I was forced into it.
I became minimally familiiar with DOS as a result. But MOST machines early on had exclusive protocols and dedicated keystroke sequences. The Furnaces (Thermco) were maybe the most advanced.
You'd enter a line of code using a pretty much regular keyboard. You had to manually insert goto and return labels. But the modular nature of the programs made changing them fairly routine.
At one point I could probably talk to 100 machines or MORE. The LAST fab I worked in? All (98%, anyway) would communicate with a common database via t-base or whatever it was called.
So If I wanted a recipe, I'd request a 'download' and it would appear. You could only load recipes to any given machine certified FOR that machine so no confusion. In THOSE days I had lots of passwords
and programming keys....(real keys to unlock keyboard) and helped write / download a lot of recipes for a lot of machines.
That was the beginning of FULL managment of a factory including product movement. It became very difficult to mis-process a lot since it would only go into (track INTO) the 'right' station for the needed
process. Of course people are fairly ingenious and got around all sorts of safeguards to screw things up. That kept in a job.
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