Denafrips Terminator R2R Multibit, ultimate pcm redbook converter??

I’m guessing she’ll ’get’ the ladder dac, right from the first note.

Sometimes we can't define a thing... but we know what it is when we hear it.

I would REALLY like to hear comments (if not the dacs themselves) about the Holo Audio Spring, Kitsune edition vs the  Soekris 1541. Since the 1541 is just coming out it will be a while but both these dacs intrigue me. There are reviews out there on the Kitsune so if anyone pulls the trigger on the Soekris, please post comments here.

I can only speak for the Holo as I listened to it at the L A Audio Show. It was in the headphone lobby area and was fronted by the outstanding Headamp GS-K Mk ll. I listened through the Hifiman HE1000 V2, Audeze LCD-4 and Focal Utopia headphones (The Hifiman won ears down) so from source to headphone everything was top notch, to say the least. 

All the while I listened (about 30 minutes) the Holo output stayed steady at 44.1 and it was there and then that I decided I could easily live with a high end headphone set up, if space were a consideration or if I had more disposable income. It was easily the best sound at the show and I'm convinced that the Holo was largely responsible for the purity and quality of the sound. Nothing was amiss.

Thanks to that experience and this thread, I'm considering getting the Holo and keeping my Marantz SACD player to use as a transport. This is really a tough decision as I don't need to go down that rabbit hole again.

All the best,
Nonoise

@teo_audio

Just because there are many bad sounding (screeching as you put it) Delta Sigma DACs does not mean that none of them are any good.

The latest Delta-sigmas use multiple 1 bit converters to achieve the same as a 6 bit R2R DAC. You can understand how a ladder DAC takes output from a resistor network where a small number of resistors are exact multiples of each other (1x,2x, 4x, 8x etc). Well you can also build a network from the SAME 1x resistor but simply by using a huge number of them. This is in effect what new Sabre Delta Sigma DACs do - 64 x 1 bit DACs - and by summing them to various degrees you get up to 6 bits.

So the line between R2R and Delta Sigma is blurred when you realize that the latest Delta Sigma chips are behaving much like an R2R DAC (but only a 6 bit one). The end result is that the latest Delta Sigma DACs are extremely linear (benefit of 1 bit) and yet they also do not need to upsample nearly as much as older generation pure 1 bit DACs (without a 64 array).

Of course an R2R DAC can be designed to be NOS however this is at the expense of linearity (THD) performance.

Since multibit DACs have great low noise but poor linearity and the 1 bit DACs have excellent linearity but high noise NEITHER are purely the best approach - the 6 bit DAC with some oversampling is currently achieving the best performance.

More explanation here of how one designer has approached the challenge of noise and linearity.

https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/inside-the-dac2-part-2-digital-processing

Furthermore, as this manufacturer states 90% of the circuitry and the major part of DAC performance is all in the ANALOG design (so according to manufacturer much of the performance is NOT even related to Multibit R2R NOS vs Delta-Sigma digital conversions)

https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/149341191-inside-the-dac2-part-1-analog-processin...

Conclusion (if you buy this line of reasoning): It is far far more important how well the DAC is designed and built than the specific digital conversion chip employed (1704, 9018 etc)!!!!!!!

Excellent sounding DACs do not ALL have to use the same exact methodology and there is more than one way to skin a cat.