Higher End DACs

E-mail from T+A last week:

thank you for your feedback! I'm pleased that you are very satisfied with your SDV3100HV!

There are plans to support the audio format MQA in the long term. But if or when we will be able to realize an update for SDV3100HV, I cannot answer you.

I wish you much joy with your SDV3100HV!

All the best!


T+A elektroakustik GmbH & Co. KG
Bernd Mölling
Planckstr. 9-11
DE 32052 Herford

audiotroy...i laud you as a very informed dealer. i really do. i also have no reason to question what you say. in the end the customer decides after learning and hearing the product. it is my hope that you don’t demean customers that don’t come to the same conclusion. it happens a lot but is a poor method of selling products. the most enjoyable job i ever had was selling SAE (when it worked) and JBL when i was in college a long time ago.
on another topic i find RH to not be credible. how many times has he cited a new ‘reference’? Of course it’s not just him. On a short list of honest reviewers I kind of like mike fremer. he seems straight.
i have zero at stake in the dac sweepstakes. i just think the bartok should be on everyone’s list to consider given its price vs the uber gear cost. i’ve never heard a bartok and it wouldn’t matter as one has to listen in home to know what it really sounds like. i know the rossini well and do expect that the bartok is in the ballpark which would be a very good thing.

I will add that over the past 3 or 4 years I had various setups including Lumin, Aurender, Hegel H360, Gryphon Diablo and a Accuphase E-470, Naim Nova, all with DAC’s and whilst very good to extremely good, the T+A just totally walks all over them for every Audiophile platitude you may care to think of, it is just everything that I have been striving for......at long last I am extremely happy....

Let me address a few wrong facts mentioned here...
The first major streaming DAC was not Lumin, but it was the company they copied, Linn. Linn was the first high-end audio manufacturer to ditch CD players altogether and invest in the streaming DAC category. Lumin started their company by completely copying the Linn Klimax. Of course, they've moved on from there, with their own designs, they might sound even better than Linn's, but the fact remains that Linn is the original innovator, not Lumin.
Then, MQA. Fact is, MSB was one of the very first companies to implement MQA. Why? Because it's so damn easy for them. The whole DAC is programmable via software, and since MSB controls the whole stack (no OEM stuff there), all they had to do was write code (or incorporate MQA's) and deploy a new firmware upgrade. The new hardware for USB was required only because MQA requires it for the "A"uthentication part. 
The same thing happened with DSD, way back. DSD was literally implemented in a manner of days by MSB's engineers, and deployed (for free) via a simple firmware update. 
Other manufacturers, who rely on OEMs for their USB or Ethernet inputs, had to wait much longer to deploy these technologies, as they don't have effective control over their own product.
I truly think you should definitely give Vince @ MSB a call before you do anything.


cheers,
Alex

4425 at this price point it will of course come down to taste, features, philosophy and of course sonic palatte.

Mr. Harly has the enviable task of testing the latest and greatest in digital so it is only logical he will endorse or non endorse a particular front end which is new on the market which may upend the apple cart as there are new companies and products being introduced. 

Lumin, DCS, MSB, T+A, EMM Labs,  Esoteric are all fantastic companies with state of the art digital front ends, and of course it is possible to fall in love with one over the others. 

We have tested EMM, Esoteric, and have had DCS gear traded in, we keep on comming back to Lumin because it is so good for the price point. 

As we have mentioned in other posts the Lumin X1 is not going to be for everyone, if you want an analog volume control, or a headphone amp or digital inputs this piece will not be for that customer, for this reason we just brought in Bricasti to complement the Aqua, and other dacs we sell. 

You have to understand as a company we embrace a companies technology and engineering as one way to help codify the kinds of products and companies we want to work with. 

It also depends on the philosophical approach, some people like the idea of being able to upgrade their sound by adding an external box or two, in the case of an external clock many engineers feel that putting an external clock in a separate case away from the dac is not desirable. 

We are not saying that a multi box approach like DCS takes in their higher end pieces is wrong, it jus comes down do you want to take the space and extra power cords and cables to add additional boxes or upsamplers vs an all in one solution?

The reason we selected the T+A SD 3100 to be our reference was the overwelming nature of the piece it does everything well and offers a feature set as well as a sound quality and technlogical advancements that most other audio companies could only dream of.

Please show us one digital front end that:

Can be ordered with a world class preamp for almost no addiitonal cost.
Has a very good streamer built in.
Offers Blue Tooth, HDMI and multiple digital inputs.
Has an excellent native control app.
Has multiple filter setting to tune the sound.
Offers a completely separate DSD and PCM pathway.
Has a very good heaphone amplifier.
Natively decodes the worlds highest sampling frequencies.
Offers OTA upgrades.
Reasonable size and weight.

As per the OP the sound of the SD 3100 is smooth and natural it is not tubey sounding nor bright, just neutral with a hint of warmth and smoothness. 

One possible advantage may 

The fact that this dac can process sampling frequecies that are not even available means that the Dac can grow into higher sampling rates when they are available.

We do not have a computer based server fast enough yet to run HQ player to turn DSD 512 to DSD 1024 which one of the European reviewers was able to do so and basically rewrote the sound qulaity that that reviewer thought was possible in digital.

So we will be searching for a new server line that can offer this tantalizing prospect of being the best digital on the planet and yet still costing a fraction of a full MSB or DCS stack costs. 

This is an exciting time for high end digital.

We by no means mean to imply that the T+A will sound better than anyone elses product just that it is a unique product that does happen to sound amazing especially if you go the distance and use a very high end server that can handle the highest of frequencies.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor T+A dealers