BRICASTI M1DAC DIRECT TO VAC PHI 300.1A OR...?

I have owned all 3 and the Bricasti is hands down far superior in every way. The Vega has got the Directstream beat as well but doesn't hold a candle to the Bricasti ... Using a Simaudio I7 integrated and I toggle between using my Bricasti as preamp and I prefer it as a pre with my Zu speakers...

Liszt458,

The Bricasti will far outclass his speakers, IMO.

A little late here, I find that unless the pre-amp is of exceptionally good quality the sound suffers vs using a DAC with a quality digital volume control.

I have done rooms for T.H.E. Show Newport and RMAF and we did some tests fully expecting an audible Illusions pre-amp to be better with the VAC than using direct to DAC. It was not the case. Using very high quality Chapman speakers with Scan Speak Drivers.

Now I did another test. Using a reasonably good DAC, the HEGEL HD25 feeding a set of Genelec s30D ribbon tweeter solid state class a/b tri-amplified 120 watts per channel speakers being fed power by DH Labs Redwave power cables (these made huge difference too) . I went direct into them and then through a very high quality E.A.R. 912 Pre-amp. The 912 was clearly superior sounding, bass was better deeper, fleshed out more delineated, piano harmonics were correct.

So in one test we had a VAC PHI 200 using a Wadia 860x Both the DAC and AMP were of very high quality the Audible Illusions 2a pre-amp was of medium quality.

In the other test we had speakers of not quite as good quality , a high value DAC of almost reference quality, and solid state amplification. In this test having tubes from the 912 pre-amp may have influenced the test.

My personal take after this... spend your money on better speakers and amps until you hit the pinnacle and then , and only then consider a top quality pre-amp.

List458 hi, go direct (M1 to Vac) for the most transparent/dynamic sound.

Your dac from it's se outputs has 2v output at a very nice low 29ohms output impedance, this is better than most preamps have to drive a poweramp direct with.

Your amp (which is a poweramp with passive volume control on the input), has 36db of gain on it's se inputs, so your dac has more than enough output voltage to drive it into clipping.
But I would get the passive volume control on it taken out of the circuit, so it is then a true poweramp, so the output of the Bricasti is not seeing the passive volume control.

Cheers George

I find that unless the pre-amp is of exceptionally good quality the sound suffers vs using a DAC with a quality digital volume control.

No big surprise.