Filburt

Happy birthday, Naaman

happy birthday grawk

Looks plausible. Could be DAC8581 in the alternative, which doesn't have an internal filter.

Happy birthday Colin!

Happy anniversary, Dreadhead!

Happy birthday, Steve!

Well, 16 pin (looks like TSSOP-16?), >1MSPS, buffered voltage output, and "industrial." That tends to narrow it down. I'm not sure what to make of "handles sampling rates up to 15MHz" or "useable for 16 or 24-bit audio." As far as I'm aware, there aren't any 15MHz 24 bit DACs; the fastest I've seen are the ARDA AT1401 (1.536MHz) and PCM1704 (768KHz). 15MHz is also an odd spec for a high speed dac. There may be one out there but I haven't seen one that's >= 16 bits and 16 pin. If anyone has seen a 15MHz 24 bit DAC of any sort, I'd be curious to know about it. Anyway with those caveats in mind, if you want just some guess at it, maybe DAC8581 but it's hard to tell from the picture. I don't remember the pinouts on many dacs of that sort and don't feel like digging through datasheets over it. - I just noticed that one of the reviews Metrum links to has measurements of the DAC in it.

Are the opamps all secured in their respective sockets? Also, maybe check for bad solder joints.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday!

Harmon and Harman are homophones for many (particularly American) English speakers, and Harmon is the more common spelling for the surname occupying that pronunciation under said conditions. This is likely why you see it show up so often. Tyll - Great article! I enjoyed reading it

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what in the hell happened in this thread

Happy birthday, deepak!

At least on cursory glance, I can't really find much more information other than that it uses a tenor usb controller, pcm1795s, and an asrc. I don't know if it's 'obviously horrendous' but it isn't 'obviously innovative', for that matter. I'm not a big fan of this approach (i.e. reclocking and resampling using an ASRC), but it's serviceable. It probably sounds fine; most things sound at least OK nowadays. IC and app note development has advanced to that point. It's kind of hard to say much more without more details about the design.

What is the output stage design on the iDAC? It uses an ES9016 which is a substantially better converter than that in any of the others listed here. Did a cursory search but didn't see anything detailing it.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Nebby!

Happy Birthday!

Being an effective contributor with a project such as this involves a measure of humility and having compassion for your audience. It isn't enough to be right, even if it seems as though that should be enough. As to whether you are an 'outsider', there is certainly a social club dynamic, but that's not atypical in a community. It isn't a group unified in opinion or interests, though. There are other members here who are interested in the empirical side of audio, including myself, and have on several occasions expressed many of the same sentiments you have about the audio business and the hobby at large. In this case, knowing your audience better may have helped, and I think this is one of the reasons new members are ordinarily advised to lurk for a while before posting.

A lot of the antipathy you have received has been due to your attitude towards even mild criticism and disagreement, and a tendency to generalize about the knowledge, motivations, and experience of other parties in a manner people find insulting. I get that you feel like some people have been unfair to you or inappropriately severe, but that's kind of life in a hobbyist scene and I think you are letting it hurt the long term success of your project by burning bridges so early on. You cannot reasonably expect people to respond well to such a severe and absolutist tone, whatever the merit behind your views. Some people who initially respond poorly to your findings and inquiries may, with an appropriate level of diplomacy, be more willing to engage with you. If you want to be a crusader and polemicize that's obviously your decision, but that isn't the way to have a productive debate and be successful in reaching out and informing people in many circumstances. I'd still like to see you stick around because I think there is a potential here for some valuable dialogue and it's interesting work, but you seriously need to chill out, irrespective of whatever community you decide to participate in.

Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday

?

I really wasn't implying much of anything about your design experience or knowledge about it since I am not particularly familiar with your background. Clearly from your reviews, you have experience with measurement and this isn't new to you. That wasn't the point of my response. Rather, I have an active interest in quantifying sound quality and it seems you do as well, so I thought it was a logical progression to look at DIY and/or tweaking higher performance gear in future efforts because I thought that might lead to some useful data on the matter. I understood your commentary regarding audibility of distortion as referencing what might be called a standard view, rather than a report on empirical studies you have done, so I thought to comment on that since I thought it would be worth it to do an investigation which would test that position. If you have already done so, then that's OK and I do think it would be interesting if you shared those results. I've already suggested before that I think this work is valuable and that I believe you are taking a genuine interest in contributing to the community. Giving you feedback and critique is not tantamount to indicting your character. From the tone of your posts, I get the impression that you approached posting here from the perspective that it is more or less like head-fi. Normatively and demographically, it just isn't. You aren't the only person here well experienced in test and measurement and hardware design, and product hysteria and epistemic closure are really not as much of a problem (social exclusivity notwithstanding). So, posting about things like "Too many live in a freakin' fantasy world with kludged together crap they think is somehow amazing when it's really just half baked junk" is (1) telling us something most of us are already well aware of, and (2) it's really kind of insulting because the implication is our criticisms arise out failure to appreciate what's in front of us rather than maybe we have something to contribute to the discussion. In any case, I don't have any animosity towards you and my intent wasn't to insult you. If I did I probably wouldn't have even bothered giving feedback. I responded because I thought maybe I could join the conversation and contribute to the project and our mutual understanding.