mypasswordis

I thought that was Dusty's intentional dead-pan humour. I try to put in some of my posts subtle things most people wouldn't find funny, and as expected, no one seems to notice. A trick I partially learned from Patrick82, actually, though his brand of humour is usually more brazen.

Speaking of TDA1541A, anyone want to share experiences with them? Particularly DACs with single and double crown units. The prices are insane! Funny how audiophiles at the start of digital kept saying digital sounded worse than analog ("digititis" and whatnot) and ever since, audio companies use that as a selling point ("my design sounds more like real analog than all the other audio companies trying to make stuff that sounds like real analog!"). 30 years later, people are saying the old DAC chips sound like analog and the new ones don't.

Time to attach the output transistors to the headphone housing like HE1?

Hehe, I would have bought them just to play around with but already used up my audio funds. Guess the in thing now is to buy some $300 Soekris modules, put in a tube output stage and charge $10k+. Interested to read Birgir's impressions.

Wow, really nice sleuthing. Maybe if you submit all the info you accumulated to Watchdog or the police in Leicester, they can do something. He'd be a pretty bad crook if his info was real, but the account number is the one thing that has to be right. He says the account is under his "wife" Vingel Patanao, so maybe that's something they can use to locate him as well. I noticed the subtle bit of trolling he did with his "name" in the emails as well. He signs off as Bob through all of them, until he uses Rob in the last one.

These, along with the Stretch goat fucking posts... HC is on a roll.

Thanks for the heads up, I feel like I haven't listened to any Childish in a few years, though it's probably been a few months. Did he go on a mini hiatus or was I just not paying attention? Have y'all checked out Mac Miller's The Divine Feminine?

It also took me awhile to dechiper but if you click that link to page 431, you'll figure it out as well. Willy was about to be scammed by "Bob" but googled him and found this thread. How is this guy not incarcerated already, when everyone knows his name, wife's name, phone number, address, passport, and bank info? No doubt most or all of these are fake except whatever burner phone he's using, but still. A lot of his info still matches the info from page 431.

Andreas Koch apparently does everything with FPGAs, including the 1 bit DACs. To play devil's advocate, the argument against true 1 bit DSD seems to be evident based on what the manufacturers are churning out these days. The ubiquitous ES9018 DS chip tries to improve upon true 1 bit using 64 (6-bit) equal-weighted 1-bit converters, so it ends up kind of being a hybrid. Read this for more info: https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/inside-the-dac2-part-2-digital-processing Moral of the story is it's very hard to get 20+ bit accuracy even with the most state-of-the-art manufacturing processes available, so there is not much hope for these discrete designs coming out of the woodworks. The discrete R-2R stuff no doubt measures worse, but for whatever reason some people like the R2R sound more than DS. The fact that there's all these crock pot Lampizator goons out there doesn't really give a ringing endorsement to these DACs, though.

Very cool! Hopefully he goes into more detail about the CPLD implementation and some of the header pins are for JTAG. I've been curious to play around with Verilog/VHDL. Can implement filters, too. Damn, that sucks about the Spectral. You have enough I/V boards for balanced, so it's time to dew eet! Did you not read the last few pages of the Stax thread (see title of thread)? I recently read the Nagra HD DAC converts PCM to DSD... looked at the pics of the internals from the 6moons and was very confused. I tried reading some of the review and got even more confused. Seems like the Amanero is pretty ubiquitous these days, though.

I've come to the same conclusion in regards to anything audio and life, really. The good stuff doesn't necessarily wow you immediately, but allows you to spend long periods of time without getting infuriated. Ideally, they are not mutually exclusive but that's pretty rare. Yeah, the rabbit hole is infinitely deep. Luckily HC members @cetoole and @Filburt know all about I/V converters and DACs in general, so maybe they have some advice to offer. The Holo Spring also gives another idea, with the nonlinearity compensation. These laser trimmed DACs, especially K grade, still have better precision than any discrete resistors today including foils, but if you want to squeeze every possible bit of performance then running an algorithm to at least handle chip-specific static nonlinearity errors would be nice. Apparently Holo are the first to do this in a discrete design, in which they use a digitally controlled second ladder, but they're doing it as an alternative to laser trimming. Maybe some attention towards deglitching would be nice, too. I'll leave it to you to look into designing FIR filters. Btw not sure which NPC you have, but the PMD100 datasheet says it is pin compatible with some. Just bouncing some ideas off you and see what you come up with, which might motivate myself to one day do something similar. Or we can just wait for KG's DAC, like you said. I'll definitely check out the Yggy and Holo Spring at the NYC meet, but probably won't ever find a Segue to hear. Did you end up repairing your Spectral?

Wow, scary stuff but good to hear the prognosis...

Nice, which DACs use PCM56? I wanted a PCM1704 DAC in case of 24 bit high res but to be honest, I don't think anyone cares about HRA outside of some audiophiles. Also, you seem to have collected a ton of R2R DACs over the years. Any thoughts/preferences? Looks like bog standard opamp implementation that most of these DACs use, straight from the datasheet. Nice, I guess, if you don't want to deal with recapping older units and SMD and whatnot.

All this talk of R2R DACs pushed me to future proof my setup. Just bought a DAC with PCM1704s and PMD100, so now I can relive HC circa 2010. I still also have my Parasound DAC1100 I bought from a member here, which uses PCM63s.

I haven't looked into this at all, so could someone describe how these discrete designs compare to the old ladder chips (PCM63, 1704, et al.)? People like Audio-gd somehow got their hands on new old stock and are still making stuff with them, and most of HC probably still have an old DAC or two that use these R2R chips.

Just stay for 2 months, someone needs to be there to administer the red vodka and accidentally hit my head against the ceiling.

I'll try my best to make it, but can't make any promises because something always seems to come up last minute. If I'm actually in town that weekend, and someone really needs a place to crash and doesn't mind sleeping on something not much better than the floor, then hit me up.

Happy birthday!

Damn, that pic needs a NSFLife tag. Way too many hairs on that ear to zoom in that close.

Sechtdamon, have you been to a headphone meet? First thing I always do is crank the volume knob way down before I listen to any gear. It's pretty eye opening how loudly people listen... pabbi1 is on a completely different level from most, but there's no doubt he has some level of hearing loss.

You don't know the people here if you think a large number of us can't afford stuff like MSB. We simply choose not to because your amp looks, at first glance, to be a somewhat questionably built $300 box of parts (not including the casing or main power transformer), for $37k. If you truly wanted to share with us "what is really going on" you would have posted pics of the underside of the PCB instead of ranting and telling everyone you're not going to post anymore about enlightening us. Given that you yourself have mentioned you have built something that was better than what you sold people, for $4, there seems to be a trend. Some of us used stronger rhetoric than others, but we gave you a chance to tell us what was really going on and verify your measurements from an independent party, and you decided to run instead. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

I was going to write a long response, but it boils down to this: we need pics of the underside where you claim most of the semiconductors are, along with the heat pipes. All I see in the power supply are diodes, electrolytic caps, zener diode strings, bleeder resistors, and whatever those things are in between the caps. Also, since you are eager to share your measurements, you should be willing to send your amp to an independent third party for measurement verification. Some of these numbers seem on the iffy side, especially given what we can see. You certainly don't like excessive costs, as all the components are the cheapest you can find on Mouser. Even those trimpots don't look like real Bourns. If they are, I stand corrected. If your heatsink is dissipating 60W (it doesn't look like the one on the other side is connected to anything because only the main power transformer, low voltage supply, and empty module slot is there) why put the HV caps right next to them and then wedge your wiring right in between?

Buying audio gear seems like walking into a metaphorical minefield for the minimally informed, sometimes superimposed with the analogue of being a literal minefield. The pervasive gall of people who believe their large pocketbooks and listening impressions override fundamental engineering principles truly astounds. The fact that they don't even bother using spell check for a $37k amp is disconcerting, to say the least (not to mention the use of a "discrete passive equalization module", aka fixed tone control). Straight from their site: A discrete passive equalization module slot is included with the amp. This allows for slight analog adjustments of the amplifier to accommodate new headphone designs in the future. This can also be used to tune the system for a user prefernces. This can also be used to tune the system for a user prefernces. This can also be used to tune the system for a user prefernces. This can also be used to tune the system for a user prefernces.

I think it depends on what the W prefers, since the LXmini seems to have a mainly cardioidal polar pattern, whereas with true dipoles you definitely need at least 3-4 feet in the back and probably some acoustic absorption as well. I can confirm from experience with 6 ft tall Acoustats that large black rectangular prisms get to be fairly intimidating that far into the room