MQA settings on Roon - iFi Zen Dac V2

Neo by Oyaide d+ USB Type C Class B 0,7m looks very good and I have the Oyaide d+ USB Type A Class S 1m and it is the best usb that I had till now.

I used zen dac only with pentaconn 4.4 to XLR, 4.4mm to XLR Cable by iFi audio - Max quality balanced signal. Minimum interference.
So I cannot relate RCA Zen vs XLR 200m. So from the XLR point of view just get one of those, it is cheeper than CA200m.

I think CA 200m it is a little better than zen. A bit more on the high freq so I can say it is brighter and maybe that’s why it sounds like having more resolution. But I guess that depends on your taste. For that you should have a listen in your setup. The sound stage is clearly bigger. The mqa dropouts did not compere to the zen, went from 10 restarts a day to just one. It is more responsive than zen dac, (on/off, quick recognised by comp and Roon). I still go usb from Mac mini m1 with Roon but the next upgrade it will be a streamer, maybe LINK Streamer 2 - Stack Audio

Still no remote but same is zen dac. I’m not using DSP, volume is fixed in Roon settings so I had to manually change the volume. CA200M feels cheeper than zen volume knob, moves somehow slower and with resistance.

One thing that is harder with 200M than in other dacs is to upgrade the power. It is running on AC not DC. I found’t out the hard way, after tried the ifi power x 12V that is DC. Nothing happened to CA200M, getting rather hot, but NAD 298 (the power amp) did not like that change and after 1 day it had autosense on/off issues.

As for dacs, I was looking to upgrade to NAD 658 but did not have the cash so I went after CA200m. Now I’m glad, 658 has not so great reviews for the dac part of it, and as preamp I just bought Benchmark LA4. I guess next in my list is a R2R: Holo, Denafrips, Pegasus or Ladder Schumann. I would like to listen to Topping as it get’s so much praise for the measurements.

Hope it helps

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