NOS DACS

CnoEvil

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These have a small, but passionate following and a few respected companies are buying into the idea.

I would like to hear the views of anyone who owns one, has heard one, or even has thoughts on the approach (good or bad).

In particular, I'm interested in the Tube Dacs from Audio Note. They have removed all filtering and oversampling, which they say makes their dacs sound much more musical and realistic, as it gets to the heart of the recording with no digital processing.

They would argue that the removal of the "brick wall" filter of conventional dacs, (which cuts out to much of what makes the recording believable eg. ambience etc) makes this approach sound more like Vinyl (where this info is left intact).

What they go on to say, is that all this makes 16 bit sound every bit as good as 24 bit, since every last ounce of info is extracted from the CD.

In the context of an all Audi Note system, I'm inclined to agree, as what I have heard has been truely impressive. I'm not so sure about just using one of their dacs in isolation - hence the reason for this thread.

Thank you for reading.
 
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I play all my music from my laptop. I went from a qed J2p connected to the onboard soundcard to a beresford 7520 DAC and the difference in sound was astonishing. Was like a whole new system. DACS are the way forward imo
 

Mr Morph

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I owned three players in three years from 1986-88. 2X, 4X, 8X OS machines. Very simply I found the more they oversampled, the more it sucked the life out of the music. However, there are a lot of other factors involved, power supplies, amount of regulation, jitter, etc... As ever, try for yourself and find out.
 

CnoEvil

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Mr Morph said:
I owned three players in three years from 1986-88. 2X, 4X, 8X OS machines. Very simply I found the more they oversampled, the more it sucked the life out of the music. However, there are a lot of other factors involved, power supplies, amount of regulation, jitter, etc... As ever, try for yourself and find out.

Thank you Mr Morph for your reply.

I have been trying stuff out. I had a new Audio Note 2.1x sig out for a while (no demo ones available). It did many things very well, but even after 3 weeks didn't sound quite right - a bit bright - which was I wasn't expecting, as it is a tube design.

Apparantly its "black gate" capacitors take much longer to sound right, but it was too much money to take a risk on, so I left it back - thus the need to get other peoples experiences.

I got onto this path for the reason you mentioned above, and would be interested in where your journey has lead you - if I am not being too presumptuous.

Jez Baker, I'm delighted that your dac has made such a differences.
 

Mr Morph

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CnoEvil said:
I got onto this path for the reason you mentioned above, and would be interested in where your journey has lead you - if I am not being too presumptuous.

Many years ago, back in the 80’s, I remember a hi-fi reviewer talking about oversampling. And his quote as far as I can remember it was ‘I’m sure the manufacturers feel it will convince the public that they are getting something for nothing’. I have always agreed with that sentiment, but as my current DAC uses just 6X oversampling, and having lived happily with it for 14 years, I can hardly bring myself to slate OS completely.

What my current DAC does well is combine a ‘smooth sound’ without removing the ‘cutting edge’ from the music. I always associated OS with removing the ‘cutting edge’, although can easily see how bad power supply and regulation might lead to the same result.

The impression I’ve gotten over the years is that certain DAC/filter chipsets do OS better than others, and may be dependent on the chips operational temperature. When I read posts from people who are generally unhappy with digital, but ended up with an NOS DAC or player, I can’t help smiling, because it does remind me of my (sometimes annoying) journey through the digital world.
 

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