SW1X thread, DAC / PRE / LPU / AMP / SPA / MPA

[M0N]

For SW1X source gear

[orrman]

Wow this thread has a lot of content lol
Anyone with any impressions other than @M0N’s DAC II in his comparisons articles?

Also read this of course

SW1X DAC V Early Impresions

Forward: This is my first post and thank you for the invite to the community I have recently purchased a DAC V from SW1X and these are my initial thoughts. Cheers, -Michael The Orange Precis This is just an initial impression written by myself without any outside influence except perhaps a penchant for peaty Whiskey. It does not include any reservations. I feel anything needs time to feel the real inn’s and outs outside this is simply what I’ve heard and what I have experienced during the fi…

[Virion]

Because there is not much content written on the SW1x streamers (VDT), I thought I would give it a go. A VDTIII special has been with me since aug2024. It replaced a Pi2aes. I was looking for a better streamer with a dedicated spdif out as that was my preferred connection with my DAC (merason dac1 mkII). The spdif gave me the most organic sound.

With the sound impressions as written by MON in one of his articles about dac’s, I was really interested in the SW1X streamers. And as expected the SW1x house sound is also present in the streamers. I got lucky and found a great deal on a VDT3 SP, as new would be out of my price range.

The VDT3 models and further up the food chain also have internal harddrive present. The first few weeks I only used the streamer from internet option, which already impressed me greatly, but after awhile I bought an album (from Qobuz). Haven’t done that in about 25 years.

The sound when streaming from the internal HD is so much better. The music came even more alive, everything went up a notch. Toe tapping increased greatly. Cant really explain it. So naturally I have been buying more albums. Maybe even get one those top level Qobuz accounts where you get discounts when buying albums.

One minor downside is that the manual states the streamer to be “ideally always on”. However the software (volumio) was not made to be always on. When left on overnight the software would freeze which would require a flip of the switch on the back. You can turn off the software in the app, however there is no on switch apart from the main switch on the back. I would have liked to have a on switch for just the software.

[dB_Cooper]

The idea of improved sound from the internal HD is not out of whack. Very possible that the net noise from the processing of the stream through Ethernet may be higher than the processing of the data directly from the onboard HD.

[Virion]

Well early impressions from the sw1x dac3 balanced special. I had today the first few hours of listening. This mostly in comparison to my previous dac the merason dac1 which I used for the past 3 years.
What immeadiatly is noticed is the large soundscape. It feels like the music wants break out of my headphone, the DCA stealth. After that I found the sound to be way more neutral compared to the merason. Also the presentation was much more authorative and dynamic. This makes the experience very engaging.
The dac is very hot on the output. I had to put the volume lower on my feliks audio envy. Not much play left on the volume dial. May need a pre amplifier. Also may need open back headphone, because closed back seems to be bottlenecking this dac.