DANGERDAN

Yep that sounds all correct, i always feel its a money gamble as there are so many variables for there to be positive improvement. Poor mains supply is very rare, most of the time its due to poor wiring in the house rather than direct issues with the power source stations. That said, most good quality audio equipment's are power conditioners themselves, using regulation in many forms can create a wide range of compensation to ensure absolute steady power supply. So power conditioners are not IMO at all beneficial. Surge protection i believe is not completely useful either, as i understand it any real situation with lightning strikes will not be prevented with any kind of integrated power surge protection/ conditioner unit. As i have read the surge acts too fast for units to comprehend and prevent damage, some manufacturers don't even claim protection against such things as they are aware from experience that it's not the case. I have been reading about RFI/EMI interference from mains and from my understanding does make sense, though from the coloration and distortions added from conditioner filtering i think that a well designed PSU system that isolates polluted mains is a much better result. Preventing a disease is much better than a cure.

Surge protectors will hinder the performance of sound quality. Adding to that i have not found power conditioners improve sound, there are regulators within most audio equipment that compensate for voltage droop, unless you have some worldly shocking unstable house power.

Reading the thread i thought i might be able to put some 2c in, but looks like a lot has already been filled. As it is known to me analog reached its limitations on improvements long time ago, i think there may be some new designs with LP but generally i think its peak was reached when SACD's were coming around. Digital however is reaching new heights all the time and has plenty of room to surpass analog, as it was greatly put by one person "The best digital would be better than the best analog". Digital to analog chips are not perfect in anyway, they suffer limitations in all various architecture designs and are improving all the time. Take a look at the sigma delta chips, very ground breaking stuff and just trying to understand how they work is beyond most peoples understanding. This is the heart of digital IMO. DSD is something completely on another level that is to most people a analog killer, however i think it's just the increased sample rate capability's that make it stand out and the highest PCM sample rate would be exactly the same SQ output.

Who brought this thread from the graveyard, common speak up. WHY I ODDA. lol

Yep couldn't be more right.

ESS sabre 9018 is the top dog from what i know, even the link you provide shows it. They are used in all top DACS in todays equipment. Besides that the rest all look correct and thank you for posting this very useful information.

Audiolab M-dac just won HiFi Choice 2012 Awards - best DAC ahead of Rega and $2K Perreaux, and Product of the Year!

I had to just go up to our main city for the north island (1 hour away) and also quite amazingly there was one part where i live where they had a mansion filled with heaps of equipment. It could be because of how small a country we are. Overall i did have to go to about 5 stores but as far as i know Australia don't have that great of a audio enthusiasm but thats only a assumption i made from online searching, couldn't find much. Perreaux is a nz brand which i believe started really badly in its early days (founded in napier as far as i know) but i did have a audition with it last week at harvey norman which are their main retailers for them and i do think they are some very nice equipment and it could be comparable to either rotel or classe but i couldn't say for sure as i didn't have much a toy with them. They have a strong following however. Didn't get to try the dragonfly myself as i don't think they are available in my country, but not only that the places i visited are probably too scared to stock something not so.. well expensive hahaha. Didn't find anyone following klipsch at any stores.

Thats good to hear Larry, i actually recommended the dragon fly to a mate for his lappy due to there being a lot of noise and he wasn't prepared to spend a lot of money into a dac especially when his system couldn't fully benefit from it. I actually spent the whole week or two auditioning thousands of dollars worth of equipment and i must say i am very tired, i got to try speakers such as paradigm, dynaudio, usher, B&W, Kef, PSB, Proac, JBL, Polk, Jamo, Wharfedale. And thats just the speakers, i have managed to get my hands on a few nice and very expensive dacs but the most important ones are the CP-800 from clasee and the rotel rdd-06 which i wanted to try in comparison to my dac. I also auditioned heaps of tubes and plenty of nice transistor amps, including some again from classe. My As far as Dac comparison i have to say the M-dac surprised me very well, it was probably 90 percent in comparison to the CP-800 from classe which retails for probably 5-10x more so i was definitely most happy with that. For the Rotel rdd-06 it was somewhat better than anything in its pricerange including the dacmagic +, it was much more than i expected in its price range and even outdone more of the expensive dacs i tried over the weeks as well. I wont go into speaker comparison as it could get taken the wrong way but as far as the amps go all i will say is that more money is not entirely needed to get high quality sound, i A/Bed all the amps i tried against my beloved Rotel 1582 and nothing i found surpassed it for me to go "OH wow thats much nicer". The only thing that did really nicely was the classe again and it wasn't a major improvement but definitely something for someone to spend to perfect their audio chain for good. So yea Rotel sure have something special on their hands when it comes to well balanced amplification as i was expecting to be outdone by a lot of the equipment i had auditioned.

Yea someone else got a dragonfly and was happy with it as well, some will surprise. What i have found with DACS is that they dont have a major difference in regards to tonal or timbre quality. They all have very similar frequency response sound to it but they differ in more subtle ways and with the M-dac is was mostly separation and clarity, even on crappy speakers it makes a difference.

You can't upsample on this dac, you feed the dac with bit perfect data which you can test with a file which has its own form of information stored on the dac directly so you can confirm that the information transferred is bit for bit perfect. In order to get bit perfect playback on a PC you have to use WASAPI or ASIO with also keeping volume unmodified at full otherwise you get quantization distortion, everything digitally volume controlled within windows basically is bad. You have a d3e filter which the boys over at audiolab keep very secret about what it actually does, something about bits less than 24 are decorrelated reducing 2nd and 3rd order effects, this can be on or off to your liking. Other features related to audio are USB LSB restoration which is just for USB, havn't gone into it much as i am not a fan of USB. So yea basically this thing feeds pure unaltered information which is what i prefer and it sounds really good, there are many other features it has within the menu but more for just ease of use and interface.

Filter wise ?, optimal transient by far. Was one of the first things I was able to easily come to a conclusion with, the other filters beside optimal spectrum modified the signals in a negative way for me.

Heres a couply pics

After much listening and studying i have come to my final conclusion about my purchase of the M-DAC. I wont go into what i did or didn't do as i have done so much that it hurts my head thinking about it, literal testing actually induced movement of my entire system to a proper home theater room with other equipment at my disposal. With that said i have to say my purchase of the M-DAC was well worth the money, which in my mind was quite a good price but i did get mine at a wholesale price. The best way i am going to have to put it when explaining how it sounds in comparison to other DAC units is... separation, put it simply the overall timbre is actually very identical to most sub standard and entry level equipment. I am not saying however that there is a small change as its not, its just a different effect of sound change like of that of a speaker upgrade or amp upgrade where the sound actually changes with tonal quality. This change as previously said is best put as separation, the music instruments are more complimented with each having now their own individual identification, meaning that i can now hear ever more clearly each instrument with more ease but also more detail and character excitement. It really is something magical which had me almost into tears in the first couple of hours (not to mention me telling my mate at the time how awesome they were). With testing on other speakers i found that its not one sided in regards to favoritism which was good to see and also understandable from a researchers point of view, also this M-dac is very customizable compared to other dacs which are usually just plug and play type of material. The unit becomes a fully functional preamp and more with internal software features via menu screen giving the user complete control on most aspects of the device. I really like my dac and hope people become aware about source quality and how dac units make a difference .

I actually have had quite a few auditions with OLED, one being a samsung prototype and all the others with mobile phones, i think from experience that the brightness on most mobiles were a problem, not sure why but i believe its a limiting factor for the early stages of the technology. Another is the aging issue which they are still having problems resolving atm but i think they have managed to find a way to prolong it but still there are issues where each color ages differently than others which causes accuracy problems. Wont probably buy the first series but definitely down the road when its perfected i will, it will super seed all current technology's performance wise.