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A great balanced R2R ladder DAC: Mhdt Lab Balanced Pagoda

After reviewing balanced DACs that cost right around $5000 for the Stereo Times website, I received scores of  Emails from Gon members requesting if I could find and review a truly balanced ladder R2R DAC for less then $2,500. Well, my review on the Mhdt Lab Balanced Pagoda just went up on the Stereo Times website. It will give you all the details why I put it on the " 2020 Most Wanted Component List". The Balanced Pagoda easily matched the overall performance of the twice more expensive, highly regarded DACs. The only caveat to get its best performance you most run it through the XLR analog outputs, not its single-ended RCAs, into another balanced preamplifier. Hope, you take a look at the review, if you are looking to get a balanced DAC to run in your system.
amorstereo
georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
10,312 posts
 


Real "Discrete" R2R dacs, need twice as many R2R resistors as discrete R2R single ended ones. This is where the expense is.

Many just have pseudo single ended to balance opamps on the analogue output stage to get balanced output, so really your better off just using the single ended output unless you want to run 3mt+ interconnects.

Ask the manufacturer if the discrete R2R resistor DtoA stage is also balanced, or just the analogue output stage.

From Soekris Audio http://www.soekris.dk/ they have some of the best R2R dacs, here is the difference between their "single ended" and "real balanced" dac boards.
Single Ended https://ibb.co/V2hR2Y7
True Balanced https://ibb.co/hB1Ff1y

Cheers George
amorstereo OP
64 posts
 
Hey George,

If you read the details presented by the designer regarding the design in the review, you will see that the Balanced Pagoda doubles the DAC chips and circuit for a true not pseudo design.
georgehifi's avatar
georgehifi
10,312 posts
 

That's good, I thought being new it would be discrete R2R, I was referring to the new era of killer "discrete" R2R dacs available now, that MSB championed first off the rank over 10 years ago.

The Texas PCM-1704's chips in Mhdt haven't been made for over 7 years now, they were the last and arguably the best of R2R "chip type" d/a converters made though. 

Cheers George
knighttodd
201 posts
 
I will be checking out an SWx1 Dac ii special next week. Hope it sounds as good as they say.
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