Good dac to reproduce soprano vocals?

Any decent DAC should be up to the task.

One thing I have found does particularly well with vocals in my system is DNM Reson ICs from DAC to pre-amp (and from pre to power amp as well if applicable). I can easily understand most all vocals in any recording with these whereas not so much always with other more conventional and less coherent sounding ICs. They are reasonably affordable and might be worth a try with current DAC or analog feed from any digital source for that matter.

BTW, I think any good system should deliver clear and clean, understandable vocals and that mid-range/vocals in general are very good for testing and tuning a system initially.

If you cannot understand what is being said more often than not, there is probably something not right.

Get legible mid-range vocals right first then work on the more extreme frequency ranges from there as needed is a pretty practical way to go about getting to good sound. Most music occurs in the mid-range and vocals make for good test material to determine if the reproduction is accurate or not.

If words are not understandable in more than just a few cases with decent to better quality recordings, chances are something significant is wrong in the playback system.

Female vocals on particular are masked by high jitter levels. I recently developed a version of my products with S/PDIF output jitter in the 10psec range. Compared to the 50psec that I had been achieving this extremely low jitter delivers much better intelligibility, particularly of background singers. It develops a much more 3-D picture of the vocalist as well.

So, what does this mean for the DAC?

If you use the USB input driven from a computer, the master clock is in the interface, sothe jitter of this is critical. These USB interfaces are all at different performance and jitter levels. If you drive the DAC with a transport, the jitter of this transport is critical. If you drive it with AppleTV or Sonos et , then the jitter of these is critical. These are notriously bad BTW, but they can be improved with a good reclocker.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I was going to reply with something along the lines of Steve.

But once jitter is taken care of the character of the DAC also comes into it. The DAC I have heard recently that makes vocals sound really good is the new Chord QuteHD. Another DAC with a really beautiful liquid and fluid midrange that really works well with vocals is the Tranquility SE DAC - but its USB only.

With the Tranquility you wont need to worry about it but as Steve said with any other DAC make sure its fed with a low jitter source.

Thanks
Bill

Thanks for the thoughtful responses. To be more specific about my request, I am currently using a "pretty good" dac (the Calyx 24/192) which does a beautiful job with female vocals in general. Karrin Allyson's jazz album "Round Midnight" (a 48k/24bit download) sounds fabulous. What I'm referring to is the soprano vocalist who can produce an immediate crescendo of immense power and beauty. I have only heard this done with any grace by the Berkeley Audio Alpha, and it was lacking the warmth of the real thing. In my system, those powerful crescendos on a redbook cd are typically hard and glassy.

In most cases, I'm thinking that 44.1k/16 bit recordings just aren't capable of capturing this accurately without some "reinterpretation or interpolation" by a dac. If you want to know what I'm talking about take a listen to Kiri Te Kanawa's cds from the 80s and 90s. And the latest from Susan Graham (a mezzo) isn't a whole lot better. Are these performances just going to be lost in the wake of the turn to digital recording?

I'm not sure CD format is a barrier to good female vocals.

I can vouch that mhdt Constantine or Paradisea tube dac possibly with a minor tube upgrade like NOS TUng Sol can do them well if teh system overall is up to the task.