A DAC that crushes price vs. performance ratio

@srosenberg

Enjoy your stay in Vietnam!

How long will you stay over there?

I have a beautiful view of Sound and Bay also Olympic Mountains from my home.

I may live here until I die especially I have a beautiful listening space here.

@lordcloud

My EMMLab Dac2 has balanced output which was one of the best Dac 8 years ago.

After inserting SR Blue fuse in it, it sounds more fantastic with lot of details, nice timber, wide and deep soundstage.

I have to wait 8 weeks to get Lab12, But it will be tough battle between those two excellent Dac.

I guess that EMM will have more weight and Lab 12 may be more nuanced.

One of them will have to go!


I also considered getting Total Dac MK2 tube version.

But Dac keep improving every year with new technology.

So I decided upon trying out Lab12 since it will cost me less even if I decide to sell Lab 12 after losing battle to EMMLab Dac2.

At this point, I am not sure which one of Dac will sound better in my system.

I don’t know why folks do things without verifying they make a positive SQ improvement against the supplied stock parts. Simply replacing a tube or fuse for what is the stock counterpart without verifying the replacement part actually improves SQ is blind faith at best and stupidity at worst. 

@celander

I had talked with the owner of Rogue Audio who makes excellent product at reasonable price.

He know that some NOS tubes provide much better performance but could not provide those as stock tube with limited price of product.

Thus it is upto each customer to try out NOS tube.

It is same with high end fuse.

There are not many stories of new stock tubes sounding better than their nos counterparts. Yes, it does happen, but it is more the exception than the rule.

The same can be said, in my experience, for many stock parts in general. Unless you're talking about the upper echelon stuff (MSB Select Dac, TotalDac 12, Aries Ceral Kassandra, etc...). And even then, you can make them sound better with better/different parts.

Most of the time, things are built to a price. Better parts usually mean better sound. Not always, but often enough to almost say always.

The audio Alchemy DAC/Pre MSRP is $2K and a sonic bargain. TAS reviewed it and the stereo amp in March of 2016