Royd Seven.

[Macca]

You see people on other forums talking about DACS and saying things like 'the technology is advancing so fast'. Yeah, okay, if you believe that do you also want buy some beach front property in Arizona? You can do better for the same money nowadays than you could 10 or 15 years ago but that's about it.

[_D_S_J_R_]

In a way, I think the technology is advancing fast, in that more is being done inside single chips than ever before, hence the excellent results from Fiio and others for relative audiophool pennies.. It seems that hifi designers who don't always know what they're doing tend to want to put their own stamp on things and bypass perfectly good, built-in audio output stages and filtering, often messing things up in the process. Add ever costly bling-boxes and mega profit margins and hey ho, we have another £2K+ DAC!

Sorry Pinky, I have little respect for Westlake. he botched up the Audiolab DAC, made numerous software tweaks after-market and then fled the ship, leaving the remaining engineers at Audiolab to try to reverse-engineer what he'd done - it seems looking back.. Using chips designed for video use and way more than necessary for audio use just adds to the equation I reckon.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here, but my truly ancient QED Digit Opto with twin supplies (Postitron and a.n. other heavily filtered smps) still sounds great to me (separating the supplies makes a very clear difference) and I've been very surprised by a £11 special DAC bought on fleabay - hmm!

[Oldpinkman]

JW was not easy to work with. Mind you, all of the bloody talent I worked with was a problem in one way or another. I don't know the story on Audiolab - other than that there are two versions of it - and I know other engineers who fell out with the Chinese and left HiFi businesses they took over recently. I haven't managed to re-establish contact with JW in spite of a couple of half-hearted efforts on PFM, but AK sent me a photo by text of Westlake with his miniature dog from Munich last year, with a note he sent his love So maybe our paths will cross again. I am surprised, and very pleased to see he is still around and designing. He was suffering severely with progressive MS whilst working at Pink.

I do know the M-Dac underwhelmed me, and so did the Arcam Cyrus and Roksan that I heard at 7Oaks. I know too that DaCapo has some nasties lurking inside along the lines of the problems JW left Rega (although mine, appears for the moment not to be afflicted by them). I do also know DaCapo is radically different from any other dac I have yet heard and floats my boat with the 22 bit filter. AK tells me it would float even more with the HDCD filter. JW is on record I believe saying the 24 bit was better than HDCD. I have heard neither. I know JW prefered the 1307 filter when AK and I preferred 22 bit (strengths and weaknesses- comes down to taste). But all of those filters could plug into PT's ordinal dac, which was cooking grade by comparison with DaCapo. DaCapo for me, for the minute, is a bit special

And I am really surprised to find that so after all these years. TBH - without having done a proper AB or even listened to them at the same time in the same room, I suspect JW's Cambridge CD6 gives MDac and many others a run for their money.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Sorry Pinky, I have little respect for Westlake. he botched up the Audiolab DAC, made numerous software tweaks after-market and then fled the ship, leaving the remaining engineers at Audiolab to try to reverse-engineer what he'd done - it seems looking back.. Using chips designed for video use and way more than necessary for audio use just adds to the equation I reckon.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here, but my truly ancient QED Digit Opto with twin supplies (Postitron and a.n. other heavily filtered smps) still sounds great to me (separating the supplies makes a very clear difference) and I've been very surprised by a £11 special DAC bought on fleabay - hmm!

At last - tell it as it is Dave, I got more and more pissed off with the man's bullshit at PFM and no one seemed to recognise it. Q - How to turn failure and bad design into a money making scam. A - Use ferkin' forum idiots to do the job for you. A classic exercise in the futility of people with no knowledge being led by the nose through a path of insignificant stupidity. At least it didn't take over the industry like the Linn one

The Digit is still THE best value cheap DAC around, especially with a few judicious mods and bigger PSU. I keep being tempted to try those cheap Chinese DAC boards from ebay, always the result is meerre

[Macca]

So would a cheapo chinese DAC board coupled with over-specced power supply pretty much be as good as it can get? or is there more to it?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Well IMO an old QED digit with a bigger power supply and a couple of component changes is better. It is not as good as some old Jap DACs. My Sony has an internal DAC better than the modded QED. Of the modern more expensive DACs the only one I would buy is the Asus, heard it and it is good. Better than my internal DAC

I am bidding on what I think is probably the best DAC ever made at the moment, though I doubt I will be willing to go high enough to win it.

[Andrew]

I guess it's horses for courses but I thought the digit/positron was absolutely woeful. Along with the Micrimega Microdac, it is probably the worst sounding DAC I've had. Of course, I've no idea what it can become when modded, but the standard one was just so muddy and lacklustre, I felt I had to speak up on that one.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Speak up with pleasure, that is the point of forums. There are no cults or dictators here.

[Andrew]

I am bidding on what I think is probably the best DAC ever made at the moment, though I doubt I will be willing to go high enough to win it.

I spotted that one. I'll say no more except "good luck and I hope you win"

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Are you sure, PM me what you think it is and I will tell you if you are right.