New Lampizator Level 4/ Version 4 DAC in the house

Feed the Lampi the best signal you can and your ears will be delighted!

That is why Lucas has created his own transports. It would be Interesting to compare the offramp and the USB converter from Lampi with all its flawed tube engineering....;)

Agear, I would agree with you in that I would like to compare. The Offramp and Dynamo together jumped the performance of my Lampi and digital front end at least 50%.

The DAC is important, very important, but what it is fed is perhaps more important. I will make a bold statement here. I bet my Lampi 4/4 with the Offramp/Dynamo sounds better than a Lampi 5,6 or 7 with no Lampi or Offramp transport.

What I am trying to say is, if you own a Lampi dac and do not use an Offramp or Lampi interface, then you have not really heard that dac! At least you have not heard it's full cababilities. This is based on using the USB input from any computer source...and I mean any computer brand or type.

This is what I say on every forum. The jitter of the digital source is MORE IMPORTANT than the DAC. It's true. And Empirical Audio has been developing lower and lower jitter products for more than 15 years.

You must understand what jitter is and how it should be measured if you want to make intelligent decisions. A single RMS or even peak-to-peak jitter number is grossly insufficient. If you purchase gear based on such specs, you are making a gross error. The first flag that everyone should raise with a product is if they claim to eliminate jitter or have zero jitter. Impossible.

Jitter occurs as a Gaussian distribution of cycle-times. If you only publish one number, you don't know the shape of the Gaussian curve. It could be wide a flat or narrow and tall and still have the same RMS jitter number. The "tails" of the jitter distribution are also important. If these P-P maximums only occur every 20-30 seconds, this is totally inaudible. At Empirical Audio, we measure the jitter distribution in a histogram. We have found that narrow and tall distributions sound much better than wider, shorter distributions, even if the majority of the jitter is in the 50psec range. This makes perfect sense, since the jitter of a thin distribution is bunched in a tight range and not varying widely on average.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

The Offramp and Dynamo together jumped the performance of my Lampi and digital front end at least 50%.

Shawbros might argue with you but I believe it. Dynamo means non-chinese walwart ps?

The DAC is important, very important, but what it is fed is perhaps more important. I will make a bold statement here. I bet my Lampi 4/4 with the Offramp/Dynamo sounds better than a Lampi 5,6 or 7 with no Lampi or Offramp transport.

I am glad you have finally been converted. I made that same statement earlier in the thread and you actually argued with me. Your modded mini was king at the time.:)

This is what I say on every forum. The jitter of the digital source is MORE IMPORTANT than the DAC. It's true. And Empirical Audio has been developing lower and lower jitter products for more than 15 years.

One could argue that any dac worth its salt should be able to process jitter much like old school engineer types who say that any well designed power supply should not need power conditioning.

Steve, the Ifi crew claims lower jitter specs than Offramp at a fraction of the cost (http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/04/amr-ifi-announce-ilink-usb-spdif-converter/). Any comments?

Transports and jitter busters aside, you can not turn the chinese dac du jour into a Lampizator 7 with jitter management....:)