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.

Iv had nearly every tv by samsung,panasonic,sony since they started bringing out LED technology, from my time and continued use of new tv's i have to say once you have had a plasma (calibrated right) there's no going back. Dark scenes in movies become difficult and distracting with washed out blacks from most LED's, though i do give props to sonys 929 with best quality LED i have ever seen on a LCD. Panasonic 50 series steal my vote with absolute best accuracy and black performance. Grats on your TV

You have no idea how much i have done haha, i don't think there will be anything left i will not have done. Still going to give it a few more days before i place my thoughts.

With it a bit more tidy

ITS HERE!

Thanks for your findings, I can think of a couple places i could possible gain from using USB DAC's that small.

Thought id reply to my findings on digital attenuation and your fears with converting to this type of setup, i had read through about 12 parts of threads related to the m-dac to further my education on this design, this took 2-3 days non stop reading and learnt some but wasted more hours but it had to be done haha. Anyway what i have found is quite interesting and inspiring to digital to analog technology, adding to this my belief that preamps are becoming obsolete (voltage amplification stage) is coming clearer to me. This could be debatable but what i have found with the M-dac is there is no actual problem with quantization in regards to resolution or loss of bits, the design of the 32 bit processor is quite remarkable and is quite superior to analogue attenuation (to a point). With standard DA/C's that are usually either 16 or 24 bits, when they are being quantized they start loosing resolution or bits which reduces the dynamic range but the big problem is the actual truncation that happens because the bits are entirely removed from the signal resulting in quantization error. From what i have read this is the wrong way to do it and how it is done with most or all standard dac's, the ESS sabre on the other hand does something different, there is no upsampling or downsampling at all from what i can see, increasing the size to 32 bits is just shuffling the bit information from a smaller to a larger word length. With this increase in bit size there is more dynamic headrooom and in turn more possible range of attenuation without the effects of loss of resolution or bit loss. Truncation is also handled differently, it in fact is not removed at all but is bit relocated using a type of dithering called noise shaping. This noise shaping takes the truncated data and just moves the now distorted information into a frequency outside our hearing range, it does it in a specific way so that the signal to noise ratio is improved down the attenuation due to the bit relocation working in a specific algorithm so that the noise is transferred outside the frequency range. (moving the bottom bit). By doing this however i think you loose less possible attenuation, like with the M-dac it is suggested that going below -40 results in possible degradation of the signal but not because of loss of resolution, because technically at -48 db 24bit source files would still have full resolution and 16 bit files would be fine right down until -78 which is only 2db from full attenuation. The problem is because of the added dithering to help reduce quantization distortion the overall attenuation range is reduced due to the artifacts of this, but this is better than not having the dithering in the first place so its acceptable. With what you said about speaker efficiency and being forced to use heavy attenuation you can always add inline attenuators, this is what i am doing because from what i have worked out i will be hitting close to -40 on the M-dac. With these inline attenuators i can reduce the dile up to -20 or more depending on what db attenuation i decide to buy. Also matching source to destination helps with how attenuation is used, using badly matched equipment can cause problems, using a 1/2 higher sensitive input from a amp forces people to have to use more attenuation as the source is only having to work half output to reach full power from the amp. (assuming the source is abiding the average 2v output). My M-dac will be here definitely tomorrow so i will be back to share my findings

Quite true.

Just so you know as I couldn't tell if you we're stating that we were talking about a dac that up sampled or down sampled, that the ess sabre 9018 doesn't do that at all. Upsampling refers to a change in the sample frequency, not the sample size/word length which is all is done from the 32 bit dac.

The key is keeping the bit width for the digital volume control higher so losses are negligible. There may be a flip side to that in the there needs to be upsampling of the data. Some people don't like that. From what i have been told when using digital attenuation the problem is not with bits lost but with noise shaping. The digital volume control is often seen as bad because as the volume is decreased, the bits are lost. In general, for every 6 dB attenuation, 1 bit is lost. For example, if the digital volume is set to -12 dB, then 2 bits are lost. This is a serious loss of resolution if the DAC has only 16 bits to begin with. However, this is no longer an issue with the 32-bit ES9018 DAC. With the full 32-bit data path, the digital volume control has more than enough resolution to accommodate the loss of bits. So the loss of 2 bits, as in the example, is practically inconsequential to the 32-bit DAC. I have been worried about having to use really low attenuation due to my speakers being really effecient, so i done some thinking on how much this should affect me and this is what i come up with. If 1 bit is lost for every 6db then at -24db 4 bits is lost from the 32 bit dac, at -48db 8 bits is lost and finally at -78 a total of 13 bits is lost leaving 19 bits out of the 32 bit dac. Now for people who use 24 bit content they will loose resolution but for people like me using only 16 bit will i still be fine using the digital volume below -40db ?. With snr @ 122 db wont the noise be so low that this won't be a issue as well ??. John: I'm afraid its not so simple - You don't loose the "bits" as you believe because of Noise shaping - the same noise shaping that allows "Bitstream" DAC's and DSD to recreate the greater then 18 Bits resolution within the audio band with just a single Bit!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_shaping John