Six DAC Comparison


I am in the middle of comparing the sound of six different DACs in my system. I own them all (I know weird) but one of them is still within a trial/return timeframe.

Not to share specific comparisons today, but a couple of observations so far are that first, they all definitely sound different from each other. On one hand, they all sound pretty good and play what is fed to them without significant flaws but on the other hand there are definite sonic differences that make it easy to understand how a person might like the sound of some of them while not liking others.

Second, raises the observation that most of them must be doing something to shape the sound in the manner the designer intended since one of the DACs, a Benchmark DAC3 HGA, was described by John Atkinson of Stereophile as providing "state-of-the-art measured performance." In the review, JA closed the measurements section by writing, "All I can say is "Wow!" I have also owned the Tambaqui (not in my current comparison), which also measured well ("The Mola Mola Tambaqui offers state-of-the-digital-art measured performance." - JA). The Benchmark reminds me sonically of the Tambaqui, both of which are excellent sounding DACs.

My point is that if the Benchmark is providing "state-of-the-art measured performance," then one could reasonably presume that the other five DACs, which sound different from the Benchmark, do not share similar ’state-of-the-art" measurements and are doing something to subtly or not so subtly alter the sound. Whether a person likes what they hear is a different issue.

mitch2

I agree 100% with Benjamin on the clocking part. The real myth is accuracy of the clock makes it sounds better not that an ocxo will sound better. Ted Smith of PS Audio has given similar explanation for audio, in the time domain small quanta accuracy is all that is needed rather than long term stability and yet we see OCXO clocks, which has the best long term stability, almost sounds better than a regular Femto/TCXO.

Moreover, it’s a given fact, and somewhat similar to I2S, that the proximity of the clock is important since it can significantly reduce emi and yet we see external master clock with 1M clock cable sounds better.

I have seen in some implementation with external master clock, a modestly priced 10Mhz OCXO did not improve the performance of the DAC until a very expensive one were used. This is very inline with what was described in the Mojo article regarding lower hash noise - the modestly price ocxo did not have a better hash noise than the internal clock itself and only when the expensive one was introduced did it improve the performance. I bet if we measured both these external clock in terms of accuracy in the time domain, we would be hard pressed to find any differences.

But having said all these, I am surprised that Mojo doesn’t employ an ocxo in their higher end dacs even when they believe it can improve the performance or maybe they did experiment and found no appreciable difference in how it sounds. Curious.

 

I'm using the most current USB driver.  For Windows it doesn't show up as Mystique but works just fine.  I've also tried an older driver which sounded the same so I reverted back figuring they must have a newer version for a reason.

@danager thanks for the info. Are you using the Thesycon or the Xmos driver from the JL Sounds download link ? Do you remember ?

@debjit_g 

I'm currently using

Thesycon JLsounds_USBAudio_v5.58

 

Which Windows reports as I2SoverUSB

@danager thanks. Yes, Windows reports I2SoverUSB. I know this since I had Lampizator sometime back and it uses the same JL Sounds USB receiver board in their DACs.

@mitch2 - Thanks again for your thoughtful reviews. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I found myself looking forward to each installment!

While I’m very happy with my Merason Dac1 MKii for the moment, I’m intrigued by the Mojo dacs based on your review. 

Out of curiosity, have you had the opportunity to listen to any of the Lampizator Dacs as a point of reference? If so, any thoughts on how they compare to the Mojo and/or Merason dacs?