High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

First, had a Theta Casanova. WONDERFUL DAC and HT processor.
But .... It sounded a lot better on hi rez than CD.

Modern DACs make it hard to hear the difference I could before. Musically, at 96/24 I might still want the Casanova sound, but at Redbook ......

Best,

E

  The Theta Casanova from memory used the same dac chip/s as the Casablanca which had hybrid PCM-1792A converters in it, few bits of R2R and Delta Sigma mix, it was the time of the transition period from expensive to produce R2R converters such as PCM1704 to much cheaper to make Delta Sigma.

Shanling had two identical (earlier 4x transformer model) T100 units, but one used 4 x mono PCM1704 R2R dacs, the other used 2 x stereo PCM1792 hybrid dacs. The we did a/b’s with them and the one with 4 x R2R PCM1704 dac’s was clearly the better sounding unit with redbook.

Cheers George

FYI, i had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. I was not terrible familiar.  According to them the DSPro is significantly better.  Casanova is a cool concept withe the all-digital backplane. I considered something like that back in the 1980s. Never took it anywhere for lots of practical and life reasons... mostly i had another company and another job that each demanded my time.
So our experiences may not in fact conflict.

FYI, I had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. According to them the DSPro is significantly better.

That's because all the 8 "Pro's" (except for the Pro Prime which was DS ) were all R2R and for PCM Redbook it's better, just like what we all expereienced with the two Shanling models in my last post.

Cheers George