I can't stay silent - today we received Helene DAC, "baby" DAC from Aries Cerat. What a baby, what a beauty. From the very fist second the sound was sublime, digital rarely gets better than this - in form of Kassandra DAC only probably. I am not saying this lightly, just compare Helene to all the big guns, you would be surprised. Rich, transparent sound, real body of instruments, timbre to die for, as analog as possible, but most importantly, natural music flow, touching your heart and soul. Be warned, after listening you might need to sell some very expensive equipment. But there is solution - you buy Kassandra LE, thus may be less painful.
Oh my, oh my - Aries Cerat Helene DAC
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I don't know but I read the review where it basically breaks that down and says AC designs for single ended and not XLR..I think the ground is floating with the XLR connection, so it's a two pin design. Makes sense what you are saying and hearing is my point.
Hello gents
RCA and XLR are driven by same output, same secondary winding.
The difference in sound comes down on primarily what the dac is driving, and ground.
Also the winding has a slight edge to performance when driving unbalanced loads. But this is minimal.
Best
Stavros
RCA and XLR are driven by same output, same secondary winding.
The difference in sound comes down on primarily what the dac is driving, and ground.
Also the winding has a slight edge to performance when driving unbalanced loads. But this is minimal.
Best
Stavros
Thank you Stavros...DAC will be feeding a Audio Research preamp...I will go single ended and then XLR to the AMP. That should get the most out of it. Thank you for your reply very helpful.
I am considering the possibility of incorporating the Helene while keeping the Esoteric player as a transport. I have read that it does not allow DSD files playback. Does this limitation include SACD? It's not clear to me. At the moment I don't have a streamer and I don't foresee its incorporation in the short term.
I don’t think you will be able to get a DSD signal out of that SACD player in DSD form because of the copy protection. I believe output will be Redbook. I am not an Esoteric dealer and don’t know that device perfectly but usually there is a handshake required between devices to pass an SACD signal.
I also used to have Esoteric CD transport (SACD) and now using TAD SACD transport/DAC - I'm also now using Hélene DAC since few months but honestly I don't miss anything... AC can't deal with SACD "only"with Redbook but in a R2R way that will transcend your collection...
Thanks for commenting your experience. Much appreciated.
I assume you don't use the TAD Dac even for SACD as you prefer the Redbook layer of the SACD through the Helene. Is this the case?
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