DENAFRIPS DAC ---- Owner Impressions, Feedback, General Discussion, Questions and more....

Hello @jb45 ,

There is no US service center at the moment. DENAFRIPS products are modular design. Repairs involve boards swapping, with minimum soldering required. We don't recommend complex components-level repair. Board swapping is straight forward, it can be done fairly easily. 

There are few options to get the DENAFRIPS products serviced:

1. We will work with you to identify the problem. For example, Terminator DAC comprises of 

- Front control board
- DSP board
- Main DAC board
- PSU
- Transformers

Once we identified the fault, say for example, the likelihood is the DSP board acting up, we will ship the DSP board to you to replace. Guide to replace will be provided, similar to this: 

https://www.denafrips.com/single-post/2019/06/18/How-To-Upgrade-DSP-Board

Or, alternatively, you may

2. Ship the product back to us, we will fix it and return it to you. Our warranty policy: https://www.vinshineaudio.com/warranty

Hope this helps!

Stay safe,
Alvin Chee
www.vinshineaudio.com

Hello Alvin
That does help and is reassurring.
Thanks for the prompt reply.

I've now had my Terminator for about two weeks and it's been playing more-or-less constantly since then (about 300 hours). Based on what I've read, I still have a ways to go before it reaches peak performance. 

At this point, it is sounding very good. Compared to my Yggdrasil A2, it is comparable or slightly better in every regard. On excellent recordings, it sounds fantastic. On lesser recordings, I still notice a little congestion and slight harshness. The biggest improvements are more energy in the lower frequencies, and more 3-dimensionality (is that a word?) to the sound stage. The presentation is very similar to the Yggdrasil, so I think if you like the Yggdrasil, you'll probably be quite happy with the Terminator. 

I do have one issue though. Connected over AES/EBU, I am noticing an occasional hiccup (skip) in the music. I am pretty sure that this is because the Denafrips DACs buffer the digital data in a FIFO and reclock it using an internal clock. This helps to reduce jitter, but if the source clock and internal clock aren't perfectly matched, eventually the FIFO will overflow or run out of data. I am using a Bryston BDP-2 streamer with the upgraded audio board, so I think this is a fairly decent streamer. 

This issue has occurred when playing local files as well as Tidal streaming, so I don't think it's a Tidal issue. I'm using a NUC running Roon ROCK as my server, with a wired ethernet connections throughout.

This isn't a huge problem, in that I've only noticed this skip maybe a half dozen times since I've had the DAC and I've been listening 7-8 hours a day since I'm working from home.

As I'm typing this, I remembered that I adjusted the settings in Roon to do sample rate up-sampling (which does slightly improve the sound) about a week ago. I don't remember hearing the skips before then. This would, of course, put more stress on the FIFO buffers inside the DAC since there are a lot more samples to deal with. 
 
Certainly one solution to this is to switch to USB input, but my Bryston doesn't have USB output, so I'll have to decide how to proceed. 

https://www.vinshineaudio.com/so/e9N7BSE7M/c?w=FfeOssCZoSKx5giYwC9HxHGuACK4dO9nkFySphccRV8.eyJ1Ijoia...

New Upgrade boards for Denefrips dac's