Anything wrong with PS Audio DirectStream DACs?

Sheesh audiotroy..... PS Audio offers a tremendous value by way of a free upgrade path that..."without a doubt"...brings "more enjoyment" to any owner...and you consider it a "work in progress"? It’s not a work in progress....its called "value for money" and a totally innovative design in the audio arts. It may not be the best sounding dac in the world...but for money spent...it is a fantastic music making machine in every way...and thousands of people must agree with me... by the sheer virtue of opening up their wallets for purchase...

If you want to spend huge sums of money on a dac that will be,by your standard of thinking,a boat anchor in five years...by all means... go right ahead.

Tell the boat anchor to tbe Perfect Wave guys through the magic of firmware did tbe Perfect Wave magically morph into the Direct Stream?

No different hardware.

Direct Stream to Direct Stream verson 2 seems like also a hardware change will be required as well.

Seems like firmware can only take you so far doesnt it?

Joecasey in many techology platforms an older 3-5 year cell phone can be updated to run the latest Os however usually the experience isnt fantastic as people want a faster cpu more memory and greater battery life hence the desire to explore the updates that only really occur with new and more advanced hardware

Joecasey in many techology platforms an older 3-5 year cell phone can be updated to run the latest Os however usually the experience isnt fantastic as people want a faster cpu more memory and greater battery life hence the desire to explore the updates that only really occur with new and more advanced hardware

Agree but extends life of a product. What happens when firmware implemented in hardware has bugs?

Audiophile market is too small to attract money, best and brightest. If you want latest technology, checkout big market products such as TVs. They all have ethernet connection for updates. Nobody builds strictly in hardware. OLD technology!

A do-it-all FPGA or chip in a DAC is far from "ideal" in my opinion for several reasons:

First, they are resource constrained compared to the processing even a modest and cheap PC (that is leveraging economies of scale) can do.  You can get far more advanced and powerful filters, and YOUR CHOICE of filter with the push of a button when you're doing the processing server side.  With Directstream you either like the sound of the current firmware filter or you're forced to "downgrade" to an older firmware that has been "destroyed in sound quality" by the latest one according to forum posters.  Silly in my opinion.

Secondly, when doing this processing server side you are moving the signal processing/filtering and its electrical noise AWAY from the noise-sensitive analog signal and even into another room if you'd like; always a good thing.

Unfortunately many Boomer audiophiles still use AOL to "download their emails" so these solutions like PS Audio's magic firmware "upgrades" will continue to thrive.

The future of DACs will be NOS mode with filtering done server side, giving you a wide array of filtering options to suit your taste. 

T+A is already all over this in their flagship design that will now accept a 1024 DSD signal and simply do nothing to harm the pristine bits that were processed on the server.

Thank you Emcdade a voice of reason.

We are not against the PS audio Direct Stream, but we have seen this behavior before, where a product didn’t perform correctly or didn’t sound as good as it should, and then was magically fixed via a firmware update.

This begs the question why a firmware fix was required in the first place?

Our point made was that market leaders in digital raraly ever need to create a firmware update because their product was right in the first place this is called a mature design.

Our other point was that many of the PS audio lovers here fail to take into consideration that in all technology and performance based products there will always come a time when the hardware will need to be supplianted in order to evolve a product into its next and far greater self.

Take flat panel TV, first 480i, then 480p, then 720p, then 1080p, then 3D then 4k and of course the Plasma vs LCD wars, and the real breakthroughs which was LG rethinking display technlogy which created OLED and this also forced Samsung into developing Quantum dot and QLED which wil be Samsungs first true counter to OLED’s superior technlogy over both Plasama and conventional LCD technologies.

Technlogical innovation requires ever pushing hardware into new areas there will always be a software component but one needs to understand that sooner or later the next generation of performance will only be possible by newer and more advanced hardware.

Our company sells many types of dacs and streamers for some people it is ultmate sound quality, for others it is convenience of having a great streamer/dac for others it is having completely modular fully upgradable infrastructure.

People shouldn’t be so stuck on thinking that one component will last them a lifetime as who doesn’t love playing with a new toy?

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ