Phew, thought I was the only one who could not make sense of it. I admit reading information about the TotalDac line up is confusing as hell, throw in the various names for PSU/Amp/what have you and it gave me a migraine.
What the hell is a Triunity and why would one want one? Is a Driver the power amp? Direct their base DAC?
Need a cheat sheet to this thread…
Every time I hear Trinity I think of Neo’s girlfriend.
When I am finally ready for a DAC upgrade, my top two on my shortlist would have been Totaldac or Lampizator, but considering how confusing the lineup is, how many SKUs there are, and the potential of having so many boxes, I think I’ll just stick with Lampi
core, single, dual, tube, six, seven, unity, direct, triunity, twelve, and sublime are their dacs (in order from apparent worst to best). With the twelve and sublime being monoblock dacs that contain 3 boxes with 2 for each channel and a reclocker/splitter box to feed the monoblocks
d1-drivers are essentially and outboard output stage for the direct and stage bypassed twelve, but can also be used with other totaldacs as a booster or preamp sort of, but only line level. Only something worth picking up with a twelve or direct imo, being more semi required with a direct and a nice to have with the twelve
amp1 is a power amp
d1 streamer mk2 is a streamer, d1 reclocker mk2 is a ddc, d1-player is a server, d1-switch is you can guess
live power is an upgraded power supply for most all products
There’s a lot of other internal options and configuration but that would get more into specifics
So you start with the power cable, then to the live power psu, then the cable to the clock… no the streamer, maybe the streamer first?
Something not really exclusive to totaldac in the high end, you have a fair amount of mfg piece things out, and your digital frontend tends to get more and more complex. Totaldac just happens to name theirs in a dumb way lol. If you want even more boxes for dacs, go totl ch precision or dcs lol
Haha yeah I get it. I’d like to have a number of those TD boxes 
Thank you for this breakdown, much appreciated. The driver component threw me off, as did the upgrade paths mentioned. Now it makes a bit more sense with the context within the above discussion.
Each DAC level increases the banks of resistors for each channel, is that accurate? With the exception of the unity, which seems to reset at one ladder/channel.
… No 
Give me one sec to grab my laptop and I’ll do a more granular breakdown
Ok, so the dacs can pretty largely be split up into “new layout” and “old layout” Within each layout, the upgrades are just the number of ladders. The fact that some “new” and “old” dacs are currently for sale side by side is what made my previous answer “no”
New Dacs: Upgraded input and output stage
Old Dacs:
Vincent prices his dacs where he feels they perform when they release and cuts any from sale that dont fit into that (hence the six being no longer being sold since he feels the unity out performs it)
This is so true. On one hand it’s nice that there are so maybe potential upgrade paths and the upgrade cost is very reasonable. On the other hand it is overwhelming and simply too much imo
I guess though you just pick whatever’s in your budget and start with that 
Lampizator also have quite a few options but it does feel much simpler.
Honestly, I feel the same way about lampi, audio note, and sw1x. While there are a ton of names, I think its worth noting that vincent doesnt do any silent revisions, so if you buy x dac it doesnt matter when it was made, its that dac. I personaly prefer that over audio note and sw1x where they dont change shit about naming so its tough to tell if a dac is 15 years old or 2
So the newer models are consolidating boxes? That seems smart.
Not realy, no. The new models directly replaced the old models with similar numbers of ladders all with the same number of boxes. He just seems to be moving away from thr drivers (but those are only needed for the direct and twelve anyways)
Single → Unity
Six → Triunity
Twelve → Sublime
Think core is still there, the single died instead
Agreed, there’s way too many mfg that need to redo their lines and stop having all these conflicting or marginally different products lol, please consolidate
I gotcha, this is helpful thank you!
The new layout is what threw me off the line up progression, it’s starting to make sense along with Mon’s overview on what name refers to what component/upgrade.
also, @M0N. Idk if you have talked to vincent about an upgrade to the sublime, but it may be cheaper than you are expecting since a decent chunk of the sublime cost is in cabling and the 3-way live power.
I’m just too lazy and don’t really want to ship lol. Also still waiting myself to see what I do with my setup, don’t like to be too bleeding edge lol
meant dead more as in dead last, not out of production