I have the D6s DAC hooked up to a WIIM streamer, old Copland valve amp, PSB Passif 50s. I haven’t A/B’d with the DAC in my main system but I have no issues with it all.
If I were you I’d buy/borrow a bunch of DACs and use the return window - 14 days I think minimum if you buy online in UK? Unless you find a brick and mortar store that will let you try at home of course.
FWIW I had a Musical Fidelity MX DAC, great build quality but picked up significant PC related noise from my Innuos Zen Mini Mk1. I fixed it first with an iFi Nano iGalvanic3.0 USB 3.0 Galvanic Isolator and Low Noise Power Hub which was brilliant but £300, then decided to swap the DAC to a Denafrips Ares which obviously had better USB implementation - the noise went so I returned the iFi hub- but in came an earth loop which I could only fix by cutting the shield and -ve wires on the RCAs which was pretty annoying, I then swapped DACs again to a Musician Pegasus R2R which fixed the USB noise and didn’t introduce any earth loop. So trying the DACs in your system IME is crucial. Good luck.
And I did that, blind test, described how in my previous posts here. I didn’t know whats playing.
But ok, if you think we’re all wrong, that 300$ DAC can compete with 1000$ or 5000$, just because “measurements are below audible” SINAD story, thats fine, just get 300$ DAC and enjoy, all other people that actually had them and tested them are just wrong.
There is absolutely nothing in a gneric $5000 DAC that can not be done equally well for $300. Really, where the audiophile industry is, far more likely is that the $5000 DAC is less accurate. Which some people like, which is their right.
There’s more than just SINAD, there’s frequency response, too But beloe audible means beow audible.
You’d be surprised how many people are wrong on the internet.
Every documented well-designed blind test (hundreds of them) had shown that nobody can tell two DACs with flat frequency response apart, if the, yes, SINAD, is “good enough.” Really, most people won’t tell lossy from lossless, and nobody can tell Red Book from HiRez.
If you can show otherwise, let’s do a public open demonstration and watch the entirety of ASR committing collective seppuku.
That said, there are perfectly valid reasons ffor buying a more expensive DAC (especially if, for something like $1-2000 it comes with a good streamer). There’s ergonomics, features, build quality, support, software, aesthetic appeal, what not. Just has nothing to do with sound quality. Kind of like driving in a Benz will not get you from Point A to Point B faster than driving a Lada, but pretty much anyone would prefer the Benz…
Do you have link to those “well documented blind tests”?
Did you miss yet again the part where i explained how I do blind DAC test with Roon?
What DACs do you have, did you test them and how?
I love when people put Youtube (thats 160kbps for audio, compressed!) videos as a demo, like you can hear anything with it!
I read those two links; first one from archimago is recorded audio for which people voted, so went through ADC conversion, and when you’re listening on your system, its DAC conversion again, so can’t be taken as test.
Second link its interesting, can’t say I can spot anything wrong with the setup, so not sure whats going there but believe they didn’t hear the difference. Is it because of DACs, or something else in the setup, don’t know. Btw, there are links in that long thread where others did DAC blind test, and did hear the difference. Who to trust?
Doesn’t matter, I know I did my own blind ABX test, and I know what i heard.
Enjoy your 30$ DAC because someone at some forum says if SINAD or THD is above 90db, there’s no difference.
Would the ones @David_Henderson provided be enough? If not, there’s a 600 pages long thread on ASR with peope arguing about this very thing, with links to even more proper tests.
I have and heard enough DACs, at different price levels, to know that if one of them sounds different, it is broken.
That SMSL will be ok. Is it like 1000$ DAC? Probably not. Is it at the point of diminishing returns? Probably yes. Highly depends on the rest of the system. If you have 3000$ speakers in treated room it would be easier to hear the difference, and maybe better DAC would be, well better. But don’t know whats the rest of the system/room here…
When i shared my ABX setup on ASR, and why Schiit Yggy DAC sounded better to RME ADI2 and i could easily identity whats playing, they didn’t know hows that possible because RME measures much better, and when i repeated why it sounds better, they blocked me on ASR. So, ASR is ok for general info if some product is exceptionally bad, but should be avoided for any kind of sound advice.
Also would add, if DACs sounds the same, DAC is not the bottleneck in the system, something else is, and money should be spent there, not on the DAC. In wrong system/room all DACs will sound the same, yes.
Might be not as well built, and have less good customer support. Almost guaranteed to be more accurate than a $10,000 DAC though.
That, again, presumes that $3000 speakers are in some way “better” (which they may or may not be) and that there is some difference in analogue signal (that there probably isn’t).
There usually is a very good explanation for that.
That said, if you prefer a less accurate sound of a Schiit, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it.
Any DAC producing the same analog output will sound the same. For any given digital recording, there’s a correct analog waveform that should be the result of an ideal D/A conversion. You can derive it with pen and paper, if you really feel like it. It’s quite trivial to compare that ideal esult with the actual result from a DAC, and for the past 20 years or so, it hasn’t been a problem to get closer to that ideal than anything that can be heard as a difference. Some designers would claim that -300dB noise is very audible but hey, you gotta sell $5000 DAC that’s almost as good as a $200 one somehow!
You are absolutely corrrect though – DAC is, generally speaking, the least important part of the chain. Speakers and room will have far greater influence on sound quality.
You have the existing Macs, give it a try. Your ears are your best recommendation but do try over a good period.
I use a Mac Studio Ultra because its a first generation left over form my other uses. I run Plex, Roon and Bacch4Mac on it. I previously used a Lumin U2 streamer and i cant tell the difference. However, my DAC is a MSB Premier with the Pro USB interface, that interface provides fibre optic isolation of the USB data, hence minimises noise transfer.
Some time ago I tried to use USB output of my Mac mini M1 without Bridge. Why it works in general with same sound quality I’ve got occasional audio dropouts - probably because of bad Mac OS optimisation for audio. Also I think there is still no 32 bit audio output from Mac OS - only 24 bit. This may slightly affect audio quality when using Roos DSP and 32 bit DAC.
I’ve got pretty much every combination of Mac Mini & Pi-based bridges and DACs. Every time I’ve interposed a bridge between the Mini and my DAC, things have, at best, not changed and, at worst, degraded the SQ somewhat. I’ve settled on serving from the Mac via the network rather than USB, and the only thing I’ve found that makes a difference is that I’m using a Uptone EtherRegen switch on the audio rack, optically isolated from the rest of my network. As an old network researcher, I was surprised and a tad annoyed that it made a difference, but it did!
I have a new Mac Mini M4 that house my music and acts as a Roon server. I am thinking about building a RPi bridge using Ropiee and a Topping DAC to feed my Outlaw Audio receiver. Are you thinking this combination might not be the best sound quality?
Assuming it’s a Topping without its own network interface (and I think most are), that would work just fine, but I’d suggest experimenting with USB vs the Pi’s network connection (that would of course assume that your Mini is adjacent to the DAC, which it may not be). That’s the way I did things for several years with my old (non-streaming) Linn system, using a Pi 3B+Hifiberry DigiPro+ HAT into the Linn’s onboard DAC - that worked very well, and is now doing duty in my secondary system. Because my current DAC has a network interface, I found no advantage to using a separate bridge there. I am currently building (largely from curiosity!) a Quadify streamer from a Pi 4B & Pi2AES card in a Quad FM4 case - I’ll test that out with both USB and I2S interfaces and see what happens, but I’m not expecting much of a change - I’m primarily building it for my office system.
Im using my M4 mini hardwired into the router And a Cambridge CXN v2 (also lan) . Works absolutely great. But I couldn’t say my m1 MacBook as endpoint into a SMSL DAC with USB would sound worse because of the USB connection… that’s just impossible on a well designed DAC. SINAD and measurements don’t lie .
A Rpi 4 is also fine .
I remember gaming pcs that would introduce gpu noise whenever moving the mouse etc … but that was like 20 years ago. We are way past that.
Sure there are still DACs that don’t manage filtering the USB input but those are usually in old AV receivers and more often in „audiophile „ dacs that use ancient technology .
But beloe audible means beow audible.
