The way the designer described the DAC to me is that it's meant to work with music coming directly from a computer's hard drive where the music rips to the hard drive had error correction enabled. So, the transport needs to be a PC but they have also found that Macs were slightly the better sounding. That is why the DAC is USB only, so the dac see's a perfect copy of the CD. He also told me they are working on a SPIF/DIF to be released at a later date. I think they wanted to make their best sounding DAC as their first offering.
Just when I thought digital could not match analog
I recently had an experience that forced me to re-think a long held belief about audio sources. The experience was a recent comparison between the new dB Audio Labs Tranquility USB DAC (fed by a Mac Mini computer) to my reference analog rig (VPI Super Scoutmaster). In the past, every time I compared digital to analog, it was clearly evident which was which. The analog always sounded much more real, fluid and involving. No matter what strengths the digital had, it was never even in the same ballpark as analog. I have even found that inexpensive analog rigs have these particular advantages over digital. This has now changed. The dB Audio labs DAC is in the same ballpark as analog! In fact, it was difficult to tell the Tranquility DAC from the Super Scoutmaster. It felt like comparing two analog rigs, and my analog rig is no slouch costing approximately $7K. After more listening, I found that the analog is slightly more fluid and the digital is slightly more dynamic. Which do I prefer, hard call… But, this is the first time I have EVER found a digital source that is even comparable to analog! I will be adding a Tranquility DAC to my system and finally be able to enjoy digital as much as analog.
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- 24 posts total
- 24 posts total