You DO realize that Lampi DSD is Dac "chip less" and deos not use off the shelf Dac chips, right?
I have gone thru 4 Lampis and NONE ever looked like what you posted.
I am amused at teh fact that you have made several posts but studiously avoided my initial questions…which Lampis have you heard and where, plus where is this mythical $400 Chinese Dac. Then after you speak of power supply. I see many people are jumping to buy after market PSUs. like Uptone JS-2 which is choke filtered LPSU.
Here is the Lampi POWER philosophy:
AD point 2 Analog stage
It is more important than the DAC chip selection. Most DACs sound pretty much the same but it is the analog stage that makes the difference.
99 % manufacturers go exactly for the analog stage prescribed by the DAC manufacturer in their data sheet. Thats so embarrassing. They could do better than that. The Data sheet call for two opamps per channel and thats all. Some manufacturers use higher level own designs of opamps - thats not better, well maybe one small notch better. Some manufacturers go for discrete transistor stage - thats better and sometimes sounds great. The worst case scenario - God forbid - is opamps from data sheet PLUS TUBE BUFFER. Yes, it is so popular these days to stick two tubes just after the opamps. A good example is Shanling CD players, Opera Droplet CD, MHZS, Vincent CD6, and many more. We are definitely not in this camp.
What we do is we design the tube stage with pure triode single ended action into the DAC output and we perform I/V conversion, analog filtering and amplification in one step. The purest, most elegant way.
AD Point 3. As we know POWER IS EVERYTHING. We effectively listen to power supply modulated by the signal. So the power supply is even more important than the output stage circuit itself. Thats why 70 % of budget of the DAC goes to the power supply. It starts with selection of sections, how many points we need to supply and with what voltage and what amperage. In basic Level 3 DAC there is 10 sections, going up to 20 and more in Level 5. Every section sub-group has separate transformer winding so we must design custom transformers with many specialized windings. This is an expensive way of doing things but we believe it is the only way.
For filtering we use different techniques, but lets focus on the most important supply - for the tube anodes. We use TUBE RECTIFIER, not silicon, even in the Amber and Level3 and in every higher level as well. after the tube rectifier we install capacitive output, followed by the big iron choke, followed by more capacitance and another choke. Yes, even lowest Level 3 has CLCLC filter per tube. This technique is RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE. Other companies use CRCRC which has three caps for 1 dollar and two resistors for 1 C each. Our approach is to use film capacitors instead of electrolytes and chokes for resistors and it cost 100 times more. That is our way of doing it.
Then even for PCM playback, its more than just what Dac chip is used, its the combination of Dac/receiver/powersupply that can ne heavenly or hell. It takes enormous time to test all the permutations.
Manos, there is much more to this than the simplistic argument you propose and that is why so many people LOVE the Lampi sound.
