A DAC that crushes price vs. performance ratio
It's good to know we don't have to listen to anything before we purchase it, as we only need to look at measurements. Not even who measured it, under what conditions those measurements were taken, or what equipment was used to take those measurements...... just look at the measurements. I'm relieved. |
mzkmxcv ... timbre is just about distortion, it’s why a guitar and a piano playing the same frequency key sounds different.Timbre is an inherent quality of real musical instruments, and a more correct analogy is that it’s what makes one piano sounds different than another piano. Timbre is not distortion; a piano is supposed to sound like a piano, not a pure tone from a frequency generator. |
I do agree that, in general, most people are looking for the types of colorations they like most. Which is fine. It's why I don't really want a DAC that's described as being warm or lush, but don't necessarily run from DACs that are described as being sterile. My amps (Benchmark AHB2) have been described as such, and I couldn't disagree more. However, I also don't want a DAC that makes everything sound or threadbare. Tubes be damned, I do believe the Pagoda is relatively neutral. Not completely, but it isn't warm and it isn't sterile, and I do believe that I can get more information out of a DAC that's built to extract as much information as possible. I really don't understand why anyone would say inputs don't matter, as though they're all equal. Outputs are definitely not equal, and if you're looking for transparency, you'd want the most transparent output to begin with. Which is going to be the i2s, in general. |
