This thread is not meant to give reviews but just my general impressions across (usually) short demos with a variety of more obscure dacs. I’ll denote how I heard each one and for how long. My primary goal of a great deal of these demos was to decide on a dac for my own system, but since that has already been solidified (see my signature) this will now just be demoing for fun and curiosity.
Impressions:
10k + used
Totaldac d1-twelve-mk3 – owned (current reference)
** Without Driver
** With Driver
My goal is to write impressions of each of these dacs and then link them back to this post for traceability, but if you don’t see a link to something I have heard and want some more info feel free to just ask.
Proper impressions to come later but this one is a pass for me. TBH id rather just fork up for a weiss given my slight complaints here.
Ok, so the first demo for the day was the Sonnet Pasithea. I am not super clear on new pricing (maybe 5k or so) but used they seem to be going for around 4k USD currently which is where I will evaluate it at.
Overall the Pasithea is certainly highly detailed but also colored and a bit strange sounding overall. The sonnet “wall of sound” is quite present with staging reminiscent of HD800. Its actualy fairly large but almost everything feels like its the same distance away. It has a classic “NOS sound” with a good density and images placed within a “dark” colored background (as opposed to images placed within a lighter/airier background like with dave/hugo2 and weiss), but it actualy managed to have some pretty fantastic energy. I think this energy was the rea stand out of the dac over all and lent its self to really solid timbre for horns. Unfortunately I didnt feel this timbre translated super well to everything else. Over all I suspect the detail is above something like a spring 3 (didnt have them side by side and only had 2 hours on the pasithea) but I think they are holistically probably similar levels with pasithea winning in detail and energy but spring 3 being a clear winning in general organicness, stage dynamics (how well it handles everything between close and far), and general timbre (pasithea better in woodwinds and horns but not even realy close elsewhere)
Ultimately, for the price, I feel like this is kind of a pass. I may take it over a TT2 as a pure dac but if you can deal with larger sizes I dont realy see a propper reason to pick this over something like a spring 3 (aka, if you dont like spring 3 just go a completely different option)
Is the SU2 yours? That’s good that you get to try the ENTIRE chain. I don’t want to hear buyer’s remorse out of you mister. Def jelly you have the ability to set those kinds of trial up!
