Don’t have the Weiss yet, but that’s what I’ve targeted. Currently still running Pi2AES>Evo Coax>LaVoce S3>Ohno XLR>CHA-1. Maybe by the end of the year, unless a killer deal pops up sooner.
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So i have the yggy a2 in house right now and even running it with shitty cables, sitting on the ground, and SE out i have to say i am actualy blown away by this thing. I need some mroe time to get my thoughts on what exactly i like about this thing but i am significantly happier with it than i ever have been with the sagra. Its unfortunate that i cant try it with the forge since i dont have room at home (and dont want to take the better part of a day to let it warm up again) but its making me enjoy the 13r more than i ever have before. This thin has finaly got some damned texture and doesn’t feel so horrendously flat and boring anymore. Tbh i think ima see if i can just buy it off the guy im borrowing it from.
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Any opinion on audio GD products as a brand?
i’ve been seeing some midrange dacs from them pop up on headfi, they look very good but honestly I rarely hear anyone mention the brand, are they any good?
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Used to be a very popular brand on head-fi.
General concensus now is they outperformed by a lot of products at their price point.
Their first High end R2R DAC has the dubious distinction of getting a review by Torq when he posted over at SBAF where he refused to complete the review because it sounded so terrible.
Obviously one reviewers point of view on one item, Currawong uses a Master 9 amp, and clearly loves it, so YMMV.
It’s not a brand I’d look at unless I’d heard the specific piece.
Link to review
And a quote from it
Like the singularity that forms the center of a black hole, it warps time and space and relentlessly sucks in everything around it. Just that, in this case, it’s not time and space being warped – it’s one’s sense of utter disbelief, and it is not matter being sucked in but instead any hint of musicality or enjoyment. In other words, the various inputs of this DAC form a virtual event-horizon from which no sample data escapes unmolested … from which no music emerges … only a poor facsimile of what once was.
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While I personally don’t think they are that bad, but I can’t say I’ve been compelled to buy any of the audio gd dacs after listening. I do think they are better than their amps for sure, but personally while they have a more fun signature they just aren’t really refined and lack finesse, and also have issues with compression and peakiness too. Spatially I also recall them being fairly vague. They tended to have a sense of muddiness and cloudiness that was also hard to get past imo
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For the price, it’s a stellar piece of kit and the DAC I’m rooting for mos in the great DAC article that @M0N has everyone on tenterhooks for.
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It’s likely one of the best value dacs in it’s price range, really hard to compete with what the yggy a2 offers for the money imo. Only real gripes is that sometimes it’s a huge synergistic miss with some amps, and also that SE performance is lacking, but it’s hard to complain for what it does at that price point
I will get to that dac write up eventually lol, but the yggy would really be up there. Currently finally getting to writing some impressions of the twelve
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You’re forgiven for being otherwise occupied. lol
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Funnily enough I’ve actually had the opposite experience, tried a few fairly high end things with sub-par source and whether I enjoyed it or not it did end up paling in comparison to whenever I found great source gear for each. Now I’m taking care of my system in different ways, making sure I have phenomenal source gear and even with cheaper headphones I enjoy my system more because the source gear really bring it to life. Tried tons of high end stuff and while it was all enjoyable to an extent on cheaper gear I would now choose great source gear plus cheaper headphones etc any day over using some cheaper gear and higher end headphones!
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Can you use powered usb cables on dacs that don’t require it without any compatibility issue?
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Yep, no issues there. DACs really mainly start to gripe when you use unpowered when they aren’t expecting it, but powered usb generally never cause issues
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Anyone heard anything from Audiophilleo?
Was reminded of them when thinking of usb reclockers, they look like fancy guitar pedals with screens and have matching psu and whatnot, wonder how they are but not enough to buy one lol
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They look cool. At that $900 dollar price point though, it’s got some tough competition! The SU6 with its very good internal power supply is a tough thing to beat in the mid-fi space.
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I’ll preface this by mentioning that I don’t plan to upgrade any time soon, due to a 2-Channel setup not being viable at the moment, but I’d like to keep an eye on the specific brands involved. With my recent purchases I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer both warm and warm-of-analytical (perhaps “musical”) sound signatures. I’ve especially come to love R2R DACs and the type of sound that they offer, so I’d probably like to stay as much within that category as possible.
Speaker choice is definitely a loaded question (for another post in the future, but probably something transparent), but that aside, what would be the ideal upgrades to the BF2 + RNHP and Ares II + Singxer SA-1 combos? Including the guy I bought my Ares II from, it looks like the Pontus II is the “direct” upgrade. As for everything else I’m familiar with, it’s a bit of a toss-up.
While I’m seasoned enough with entry-mid gear to know my way around, high-end to summit is where I find myself mostly lost. @M0N 's DAC comparison article has been quite invaluable, especially in its formatting. While I’m absolutely willing to do further research myself, could anyone briefly break down amp/dac choices with the WARM RELAXED/NEUTRAL FORWARD/SLIGHTLY ANALYTICAL categorization in mind? I have that set-and-forget approach to electronics, so I’d prefer keeping the amps solid-state (I’m open to tubes, but that also seems like another can of worms.)
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Well, on the dac side of things, if you like the bf2 and want to take a step up, move to the Yggy OG A2, that’s a direct upgrade while keeping a similar signature. The Pontus or Venus are likely the upgrades you would move to if you like the ares, although you might find that signature wise they start to lean more clean than the warmer ares ii (but carry across some traits). Amp wise, unfortunately I’ve just not found a direct upgrade for the rnhp for what it does, but there are other good amps out there as alternatives. As a direct upgrade to the singxer, hmm, you honestly might like a violectric v280 (but you’d have to change the dac to something like a soekris 2541, berkeley alpha series 2, or something like that) or their v550 (and dac wise moving to something like a holo spring or sonnet morpheus)
You have a lot of options though, what main headphones are you going to be running, and what have you both liked and disliked about your current stacks?
Well, if you are going to be looking in that 5k sub range, I do have a dac writeup in the works for that range, hope to have it done in a week or two lol
These are basically literally the 3 categories I decided to go with to start grouping them lol
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Ah, that’s something I’ve overlooked. I’ve been using the HD800S and LCD-XC, which I chose for being detailed and mostly uncolored. EQing from neutral is something I find preferable over “neutralizing” or tweaking something colored.
I like the BF2 + RNHP for what it accomplishes, so I don’t have any glaring issues. The Ares II + Singxer SA-1 would be nice if it could bring back some of the detail whilst maintaining the signature smoothness.
I should have addressed that as a speaker amp like the RNHP. Something that’s neutral like the RNHP or just about anything transparent (or a touch musical-of-transparent) would suffice.
Going full s m o o t h for me is ideal so if the Pontus or Venus maintain that aspect, that would work.
Thank you, that’s a good starting place I can work with/look at.
Yeah, I used your table as reference. Meant more of a similar break down approach in reference to amps (as well as dacs which-were-already there… “stacks” would probably have been a better choice there), haha.
Thanks for the help!
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Oh, like a speaker amp equivalent? I actually have no idea lol, I’ve never really thought about trying to find speaker amps that sound like a specific headphone amp/chain
Perhaps this is just me, but I don’t personally find the denafrips dacs smooth, increasingly less smooth as you go up the ladder as well. That smoothness might be more a trait of the singxer than the ares ii imo, try the ares ii on the neve and see if it’s as smooth perhaps
Ah ok
Getting all confused tonight lol
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It’s quite interesting to see all the DACs I’ve heard (With Spring 3 instead of May) excluding TT2 are all in the warm leaning column lol
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I mean, would you agree with that? Or nah. Nothing is finalized yet, but it’s hard to separate into only 3 categories, but I need to keep the number of categories slim to make meaningful comparisons
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Hard to say without hearing any of the other DACs in the other columns.
Though based on what I heard from TT2 I might agree.
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