Great amplifier that I remember.stax was very serious with all there power and pre amps When they used to make them.
Delta Sigma Versus R2R Ladder
- Thread starter Ron Resnick
- Start date
Yes i'm in love with stax da 80 monos?amazing amps(1976)
There beautiful.I once owned a stax cay preamp And a Quattro ll CD player.excellent stuff.
I have looked for a STAX but never found one in time to buy it. They are guarded jealously... Also the original Manley Wave DAC was with the UltraAnalog chip....the later one was with the BB PCM1704K...also a very good chip but somehow still not the same.
The Ayon Skylla 2 I have now is also a rather impressive machine (with BB PCM1704s...2 per channel).
and of course the Aries Cerat Kassandra with 8 x AD1865N chips (16 DACs!) per channel
I know ad 1865n from audio note dac kit sounds really good, the bb pcm 63p-k is my favorite burrbrown exsample Accuphase dc 91(16 x pcm63k)
of the new ones is the soekris r2r board nos with 6n6 tube output my favorite.
Accuphase what a machine
I have a Monarchy Audio M24 DAC with the wonderful BB PCM-63...resistor IV and a SRPP tube output stage. BB DF-1704 digital filter chip with 8x oversampling...best dac ever for 1k new...
fantastic dac for little money audio alchemy dde 3.0, with battery power it clearly beats expensive dacs. Ad 1862 chips i2s interface
or
Woodside /Radford Dvac18 dac output stage 6sl7 + 6sn7 per chanel
or
Woodside /Radford Dvac18 dac output stage 6sl7 + 6sn7 per chanel
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Yes, everything is important, but the component quality is a secondary factor compared with the DAC architecture and filtering.
The Holo May KTE is insanely good, especially for the price. It reminds me of a mini MSB, when given clean power and a good power cord, it fits in systems with $50K+ amplification without being outpaced.
A friend of mine has the Holospring and he strongly prefers his Ayon Stratos. He says the Holo sounds very “mechanical “ by comparison. If you want a very good R2R DAC for reasonable money then find a used Ayon Skylla 2 DAC or CD5s...great sound.
I havent.
But someone told me that his abbas dac was way better than his holo dac. Given that abbas designed the sw1x dacs, my guess is that the sw1x is better than the holo.
A friend of mine had the Holo KTE level 2 I think (or level 3...don’t remember) but now has an Ayon Stratos (Which uses ESS Sabre and it sounds far more natural and realistic...and I am a fan of ladder DACs!
For reference, I have an Ayon Skylla 2 DAC, which uses the famous BB PCM1704K chips. Out of curiosity (because Stratos and Skylla have the exact same tube output stage and tube rectification for that stage) we compared the two Ayon DACs and found that 1) They both sound great, 2) They sound quite similar, no doubt because of the analog output stage and 3) There are still some differences that we think are the signatures we have heard between DAC technologies, with the Stratos being a bit more airy and ethereal and the Skylla more grounded and solid.
Stratos is, to date, the only DAC with a Sabre that I could say I like.
PS, to make the two Ayons sound similar we had to turn off 24/192 up sampling on Stratos (I never use it on Skylla) and go with the less sharp digital filter. With up sampling on the Stratos sounded thin and wispy and a bit hollow...
Out of curiosity, if recommending a SW1X DAC, why not also consider an Audio Note DAC?
On which system and with what music did you compare the SW1X and the TotalDAC to the MSB Select II?
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