I know you have significantly better option of the the ref 2 than I do, but I wouldn’t really cal either of those dacs neutral. I also agree that a unity is hard to skip for 10k, but I feel like bricasti really fits your goals. I litteraly never heard it be a bad pairing (outside of not fixing issues elsewhere in the chain) and it responds well to digital front end down the line.
Others that may be worth thinking about IMO are lina (i actually quite like the dac itself), thraxx (know you havent heard it, but one is for sale for 11 you can probabaly get down and its incredible), or maybe even mid tier ideon (though I haven’t heard that, so just a shot in the dark)
Edit: just saw ideon is already on your radar
Also, berk ref 2 is for sure the hugh water mark in detail and stage placement for what you have mentioned (though thrax trashes it), I just really didnt like it….
A better descriptor of the berkeley dacs would just be very raw, they reveal a lot for the money and sound like a really direct digital feed if that makes sense, not super organic, not super realistic, but they imo do feel somewhat faithful to the material being played which is why I like them. That rawness is also why I hesitate as yes they’re almost more in that tool category than music listening, at least that’s what I used mine for lol. If I wanted to listen to the recording, I would hook up the berkeley, if I wanted to listen to the music, I’d maybe pick something else lol. Listening to the recording aspect of things is appealing to me though considering I’m getting more back into working with audio on the production side of things, so that’s somewhat valuable. But yeah I’m not 100% confident that the sound is a fit for what I want long term, even if I do like the idea of it. That’s what I really liked about the pacific microsonics converters, they just sounded super raw in the good way like it was a direct feed
The other main draw to the berkely is the value on the used market, they depreciate super fast and from that you can just get a ton of sound for the money that way, I would never buy one new though and if I was only limiting myself to new I wouldn’t consider one lol
The problem I had when I had bricastis in is that while they really always sounded good, they also never really had many wow moments for me either. Safe and good but never standout. Maybe that’s really what I need here, I keep bouncing between wanting to consider one and not. I feel like the bricasti are a better balanced sounding dac than the berkeley, but also just didn’t feel as exciting. The older bricasti were also kinda rough but the newer ones are much more refined
I’m not really interested in DCS stuff, the house sound just doesn’t jive with me personally, but the thraxx would be super interesting I had no idea they got that cheap. It’s something I would consider if there was one up later in the year for sure
Yah. Bricasti just doesnt do wow factor, but its the only thing that ive ever used that made me just forget that I had a dac at all. I felt like my front end mattered more than the dac when I had it which was mega weird, but made it interesting none the less. I also felt that objectively it was quite exceptional for their used pricing. Imo, its what you should choose if you want to simply not have to think about dacs again for a while, but if you want to feed the romance and nervosa, it wont fulfil that role.
I just realized I never gave thraxx impressions properly. In short, its a weiss leaning in sound sig and presentation, but 12 levels of detail (and all the step changes that entails that im not super sure how to put into words), much less rigid ultimate stage with, and fundamentally better organicness. TBH, I havent heard super high end ideon stuff, but from what I have read, it sounds similar to that. Its kind of what the helios should have been if it didnt fall that like half step short of being truly totl (similar to how berk ref does). Its filters also make such a massive difference that they genuinely feel like EQ, which kind of sketchs me it cause I have played with filters a ton
That’s super interesting, I always liked the weiss signature but I never felt it was technically up there for the money, paying a bit for the features and brand there, so that really does feel pretty appealing, thanks for the more info! When it comes time I might have to ask where you would find one for a good price since they seem pretty sparse on the used market.
That’s funny that you guys both mention the Weiss, cause I’ve been trying to place in my limited experience with DAC where the ION fits and although it has many of the things I like about the Mojo it also presents more like a Weiss, the organic nature of one and the texture of the other but with technicalities beyond anything I’ve experienced before. The bass has a bit of color and sweetness, but not to the level of the Mojo, it has the texture and correctness that the 501 presented but not the dryness.
Like using a hint of salt in caramel or cayenne in chocolate to accentuate by controlling it not letting it run away, balanced. lol
I should just write something on it already. Just fiddling around too much to make time.
I’m completely out of my depth here, and as I’m writing I realize that you’re looking very specifically for DAC to tune and match your system, but I’d like to give recs to the Gustard R30 and X30. Very refined in terms of signal processing with good clocking and inputs. Generally no-hassle, plug and play kind of devices. They’d probably do very well off the Altor alone. For sure not nearly as scalable as what you’re looking for, but it’s pretty clear they punch above their price with little to no downsides in sound or otherwise. The R30 seems more accurate, layered and organic while the X30 is a more technical and ‘vivid’ sound with intense dynamics. The main reviewer on SoundNews did decent reviews on both. He has a lot of experience with Gustard and some experience with the stratospheric range of DACs, good reading if you can read around his flowerly style of writing. Also pretty easy to get, used they tend to go for 2K+. Just thought I’d give an extra input and for the sake of trying something new.
They do look really nice, I just wonder if they’re going to offer the level of performance/refinement that I’m hoping to reach, but I need to research more since I’ve only really seen info in passing.
One thing I was thinking about was just going with something that has inherent upgrability, with bricasti and berkeley, they’ve basically always offered reasonably priced long term upgrade options for their models, where you can send them in and get upgraded internals, and that’s a valuable thing for me to consider now since I won’t really be planning to move around to different dacs anymore if I like what they’re doing. Totaldac also offers a strong upgrade program as well. Ideon claims to have some modular design for upgrading in the future but I don’t see any evidence of an upgrade program or that being utilized yet so remains to be seen.
Yeah, that’s the proprietary DIMM slot where they keep their SW. So it’s able to accept new technology whatever that means.
In an interaction I had with them they did offer to customize my DAC to function the way I thought it did. Which surprised me that they’d even offer let alone that they’re change something at a granular level for a specific feature.
My brain always things upgrade means something physical like what Schiit does with the Yggdrasil. But when you’re talking FPGA changes SW improvements can make a dramatic difference. More efficient operation of a processor, less noise generated, better sound.
Yes, you get the most amount of flexiblity with this with an FPGA focused dac, less so when there’s a dedicated dac chip, but still nice to have and can still make meaningful differences. I just wonder if ideon will eventually offer hardware upgrades too.
Also @Draaly I see they now offer a M11 S2 which is basically just an r2r m1 s2, do you think that would be worth considering or to stick with the normal m1 s2? I had a M21 in the past, and I honestly can’t remember which one I liked more, they sounded kinda similar lol. I guess I could just get a M21 again and not think about it if one comes up for a good price…
Can FPGAs emulate specific dac chips? It would be cool if there was an fpga dac that emulated the revered AD, Burrbrown and other such chips. Kind of like modeling amps for guitars.
I guess the question would also be if you can emulate that why stop there and improve upon those models.
There may be immense effort involved in coding in that sound in. You hear about the amount of work it takes to code other FPGA components so you’d have to have something to transcribe that sound into code as a starting point. Otherwise, where do you begin?
Also some of the sound from these chips is due to the nature of the design, the ability to directly control the quality of the ladder to much higher tolerances than you can with individual resistor ladders so there may be some inherent no can do right from the get go?
It’s an interesting question and I’ve no clue, just guesses on my part.
Not in the way your thinking, in order to be able to emulate the sound of another DAC, the “DAC” that was doing the output would need to be dramatically moer accurate than the one you were trying to emulate.
The FPGA doesn’t actually do any Digital to Analog Conversion, what are most often called FPGA DAC’s just use the FPGA to implement delta sigma type algorithms with one or more bits, they still have to feed that digital signal into something to get an analog signal.
The advantage they have over off the shelf solutions is you have direct control over the signal processing.
You can do it for tube amp modelling with SS amps because typically a SS amp with feedback can have 100x less distortion than the tube amp, so you can add it back in.
What do you think of the dac mentioned by @Alfredo3001 ? It’s an interesting concept, but I’m sort of skeptical of it’s potential coherence, almost like how Waversa does their dacs with the ess chip channels being used to cover a specific part of the frequency range? Don’t really know much on a technical level to determine if this is really all that novel of a solution or not lol (seems like it, but their marketing is just so gross that it’s hard to not get at least one or two red flags lol)
