Higher End DACs

RF is the elephant in the room. The invisible elephant that changes shape and size with every digital tweak ...but still remains to affect the DAC. It's all because we have clocked digital devices proximate to the highly sensitive D/A.

Ahhh...but what if you could reduce RF to the minimum. So only room ambient remains?  Easy: put your entire digital chain inside a RF shielded enclosure (like my RF-STOP box). Only optical out; only optical in; and well isolated AC input.
It means audiophiles have to reconsider how they deal with high end audio tweaks. No single point product fixes the RF issue. No single manufacturer is dealing with all products RF emissions.
But today we can put our whole works into a Faraday box, follow a few simple principles for I/O and the elephant goes away.

Very interesting thread....Thanks...

Or do what I do and stop the RF at it’s source (coming in through the windows from outside) and turn the entire building into one giant Faraday cage. Problem solved! 🤗 it’s not that difficult. Furthermore, while not widely known, tiny little bowl resonators are effective in normalizing pressure zones in the room for acoustic wavelengths AND RF wavelengths. They’re Two! Two mints in one! 👯‍♀️

@geoffkait
I considered the problem as a DAC being an antenna. I analyzed the DAC outputs while the DAC and device-under-test was in a Faraday cage. So it’s quite clear that when a generator of RF is even just proximate to a DAC (no connection) the outputs of a DAC are affected. This means the energy gets inside the DAC. And I have the corollary that when the energy bis there (even a high MHz) the sound is less transparent. So the DAC’s designed performance is affected by:
- the xtal clocking the output is perturbed
- the multiple harmonics at MHz affect the noise floor in the audio band
- reference voltage levels disturbances

None of this is measurable directly. The audio band (to 21khz in my case) shows no added jitter or noise floor changes to 150dB. Even in my conversation with Rob Watts, he says he can see nothing to 190dB. But we’re talking High End DACs here...where these effects are plainly audible.

@dmance  Any reason why you are unable or unwilling to start a thread focused on your own product?  

There is value in what's been recently discussed. There's also value in having focused discussions that are on topic and are not disjointed because of thread drift.