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High end vintage vs contemporary DAC's - are sonic improvements real?

The vintage DAC question seems to arise regularly, more or less along these lines:
     "I can get an old XYZ for $2000 or a new ABC for the same $$.  What to do?" 
The answer almost always seems to be "go with the new ABC, the XYZ is older technology," "digital has improved enormously," etc etc. 

Obviously digital technology HAS improved enormously in the last 20 years (or even 10 years, or the last week depending on your belief system).  Sampling rates have marched upwards (though many will say that anything over 24b/96khz is a waste, and I agree) and everything has gotten cheaper and smaller.  Music servers have evolved and storage is cheap.  We have streaming now and use phones as remote controls to manage infinitely large music collections.  The list goes on and on.  Yet in my mind it's really THIS stuff that's embedded in the assertion that "digital is much much better than it used to be."

But how many people have actually compared a high end DAC from, say, 1996 (now selling for $1500), with a new DAC for the same $$?  Sure, features won't be the same - the old unit won't have USB anything, higher sampling rates, etc.  Yet for all that, I can't recall any conversations on actual apples vs apples comparisons of new vs old, especially on the **same** source material, specifically on a Red Book CD or a lossless CD file rip.

Example: In 1992 the Mark Levinson No.30 DAC was sonically at the top of top for Red Book CD reproduction (feel free to substitute your favorite DAC of that era).  Fast forward to the present. How much better does today's DAC de jour sound playing that same CD?  Sure, source file X recorded and mastered at 24b/192khz will likely sound better than the same file downsampled to 16b/44.1khz when played on a decent system.   But will a Red Book CD played on a new DAC sound better than the same CD through that ML No.30? 

To be clear, this isn't about sampling rate or format wars.  Think of it like this:
Let's say I have 15,000 CD's, that's all I ever want to play, and I've $3000 to spend.   What would I get for the same $$ that would sonically do as well as the No.30 playing the same CD?  Is the answer "almost anything, because sonics have improved so much"?  Or maybe it's the $10k such-and-such.  Hopefully this illustrates the question.

Comments and thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
raueda1
erik_squires
16,526 posts
 
My own experience, having owned a Theta Casanova long after it’s prime, is that it’s sadly very much still touch and go.

More than a decade after the Casanova was out of production it was still better sounding than a lot of mass market processors I tried to replace it with. This wasn’t just me, this was also done with music lovers who came to my home and didn’t know brands at all. They clearly preferred the Theta.

I’m not able to afford modern Theta, or really been able to listen to it, so it took me a long time to find a DAC I thought was actually better, and affordable.

This is actually a shame to me. Usually over time technology trickles down, so that what is "high end" in one decade becomes common in the next. What HAS trickled down is features, what has not is sound quality. The Casanova did 96/24 (believe it or not) and while 96/24 decoding has become quite common and mass produced, the quality of the sound is still inconsistent at EVERY price range.

One oddity I discovered when examining test results from vitamin suppliers via Consumer Labs is that the vitamin quality was WORSE at the very top and the very bottom. However, vitamin suppliers within the median range of pricing tended to have the most consistently good quality. I’ve observed this to remain true in audio gear as well. These are generalities, not absolute guarantees that any product, given price X will have quality Y. It has however kept me from aspiring to gear I can’t afford anyway.

What I will say is that you have to have an open mind and open ear. If you do, you can find some really nice bargains. Like the wine bottle analogy I use. I don’t want to find a $300 bottle of wine that tastes great, I want to find a $20 bottle that tastes great. :) And unfortunately that takes work as well as an iconoclastic disposition, so when I find it, I grab on tight.

Best,


Erik
raueda1 OP
20 posts
 

Most of the vintage high end dacs used Multibit dac chips, today these are very expensive and hard to get, some dac manufacturers are even making discrete version Mulitbit for their costly dacs.

If you want just to get the best from your 15,000 PCM Redbook cd’s then go either new age Multibit, which will cost you, or >>go used vintage hi-end.<<

One vintage Multibit cdp I can particularly point you to, would be the Mark Levinson ML39. good luck finding one, as they need to be pried away from their owners.
This gets exactly to the core the issue.  I take your comments to suggest  that >>>SONICS<<< have not really improved, at least not against the $5000+ DAC's of the 90's.  In features and connectivity the old stuff is clearly primitive, but this isn't about that.   As it happens I'm running the once-legendary combo of Sonic Frontiers SFD-2 MKIII + Assemblage D2D-1.  [see system here https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/6097]

By my reading the SFD-2 MKIII starts where the ML39 leaves off:  PMD-200 filter (upgraded PDM-100 with HDCD and more) vs PDM-100 in ML39 and 8x PCM1704 D/A's vs 4 in ML39.  SF said at the time: "These chips are placed in a fully balanced topology with 2 converters in parallel per channel per phase."   It's fully balanced throughout (of course ;-) and goes up to 24b/96khz with lots of other technical bells and whistles that I don't understand.

So, if the ML39 qualifies as superb vintage high end kit then the SFD-2 MKIII certainly would too - though it's even more obscure and was produced in tiny numbers. All the tech stuff wouldn't matter if it didn't sound good - which it does!  Superb in fact.  It has no sonic shortcomings that trouble me, my concern was that advances had left it behind.  I'm not interested in all the hassles of researching, auditioning, shipping, yada yada if the odds aren't good that I'll find a major audible improvement for less than $3000 (kind of arbitrary budget).  

Elaboration or  rebuttals welcome.  Cheers!

oleschool's avatar
oleschool
722 posts
 
Ive heard the modded trivista from parts connection it hits wayyy above the cple g investment
and it 10 yrs old
raueda1 OP
20 posts
 
All you guys are convincing me that trying to improve on the SFD-2 MKIII - which is "free" cause I already have it - would be very expensive at best and maybe not result in meaningful improvements anyway.  That's a happy outcome cause it makes my life easier, thank you very much!  Thanks for saving me a lot of money and effort!

[sidebar - interestingly the SFD-2 MKIII uses the same OPA627 op amps as the modded Trivista.  Those boys at Parts Connexion do know their stuff.]
jond's avatar
jond
5,946 posts
 
@raueda1 I can't find much online about the Mk3 but the Mk2 version of your dac looks pretty killer very robustly built with a serious looking power supply! And some great reviews as well. Assuming the Mk3 is built along the same lines it's undoubtedly a very fine dac that might indeed give modern dacs a run for their money. Here's a thought rather than improve on it perhaps improve it? Parts Connexion does mods on SF gear, why not see if there is a mod they recommend for your dac?
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