AUDIOPHONICS I-Sabre DAC ES9018K2M - now reviewed

. Please move your questions to allo thread.

Lets keep this for Audiophonics Ess Sbare Dac

Ohā€¦ Write me up for testing this one! :blush:

Now new issues with 9018K2M DAC.
This week either because of Roon bridge update with Roon 1.3 or because this DAC again broke down, I have new metallic distortions while doing 16 bit playback. Sometimes not much audible, sometimes very strong.

I really donā€™t understand is this again technical failure of the Audiophonics DAC or bug due to new Roon SW.
On 24 bit no issue, as well with the serial drive the DAC is switching to 16 bit playback as before.

Janis

Hello Janis,

Sorry to barge into this discussion like this. I bought the audiophonics sabre 32 ess9018 and i want to use it to stream tidal using shairport. I gather from a lot of sources, especially lampizator (heā€™s great!), that this is the best dac. Before i go for the allo kali reklocker and burn more moneyā€¦ do i understand correctly that this will make the dac work correctly? or is this only for certain audio files? Iā€™m kind of new to this stuff.

Daniel, le pay bas.

Allo Kali reclocker will not help you to get Audiphonics DAC working. If you are knowledgeable enough to get it working with Roon, it then would the just further improve quality of sound.

9018K2M doesnā€™t work out of box. Even with Audiphonics poorly supported manual image it has high frequency distortions on 16 bit playback, and Audiphonics team hasnā€™t been able to fix it over last three weeks - starting from rejecting issue to stopping replayingā€¦

While more expensive 9018K2M is a superior chip with better sound quality (specifically on vocals) than moderately priced Allo PCM5122 DACs, it currently works only with 24 bit files via ALSA from Roon, and on Runeaudio MPD image provided by Audiophonics but without Roon support (it needs ALSA).

If you want only Tidal streaming, then use Shairport with Runeaudio image from Audiphonics and MPD, but forget Roon. However, Shairport streaming is much below theoretical capabilities of this DAC.

Unfortunately the issue is ESS chipmaker not supporting Audiphonics with driver for this DAC on Raspberry PI ā€¦

i have this dac working on my raspberry perfectly now. can play everything i want through shairport. tidal, radio, itunes, name it!

Iā€™m running jessie light raspbian. sounds really good!

If someone is still interrested, this is what i did:


But in stead of dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac in the /boot/config.txt i use dtoverlay=rpi-dac because the last one 64bits.

cheers,
daniel.

Audiophonics have just released there new I-Saber DAC running the new ES9028Q2M:

http://www.audiophonics.fr/fr/dac-diy/audiophonics-dac-i-sabre-es9028q2m-raspberry-pi-3-pi-2-a-b-spdif-i2s-p-12105.html

The board has been made to work perfectly in ā€œhardware modeā€, and it will have hardware volume control, Oled support and input selection with SPDIF coax input.

It looks very promising! :slight_smile:
I am planning to buy one :slight_smile:

Cheers/
Mikkel

Here is review

1 Like

Hi, any update on the availability of the R2R DAC? Eagerly waiting for it!

We are busy with other projects , will update on the r2r dac when we are more advanced

@janis (and others), trying to awake this thread. This is some years later, but have you further results from your very interesting analysis of Kali (or ianCanada for that matter) reclockers?

I have 3 AudioPhonics DACs (9028, 9038) and this on the link. They all sound fantastic, but the linked one is the best. So I am considering doing some testing on Kali with these DACs.

https://www.audiophonics.fr/en/network-audio-players-raspdac/audiophonics-evo-sabre-pack-diy-balanced-dac-2xes9038q2m-streamer-for-raspberry-pi-4-p-14639.html