Ess Sabre Dacs

Daverhab,
That was an excellent answer. Based on personal listening and reading various articles on this topic, the power supply quaility and analog circuit have far greater performance influence than the chioce of a particular chip. Shegeki Yamamoto who has a stellar reputation for building SET amplifiers,tube preamps etc. came to the same conclusion when he entered the digital domain. He believes that discrete analog circuits withot negative feedback will sound more musical and natural than most OP amps in general. He also says you must place much effort towards a very high quaility power supply or the result will be unsatisfactory. His first DAC used an ultra simple SS discrete circuit,single end(not push-pull) with a large transformer and power supply. He`s a tube guy for sure but said in this situation SS provided the more simple and pure signal pathway. There is a great review and comparison to his latter tube version on 6 moons. I own the solid state version and it`s superb with my tube amp and tube linestage.

Charles thanks for the kind words ... I've also enjoyed good success with Buffering the output of SS players that use chip Op amps with an inexpensive outboard SS Buffer

These are 1 to 1 gain amps that maintain voltage while increasing amps ... I think they call them Current Dividing Buffers ... they can also help in lowering Tube based players high output impedance .... these buffers will lower it

The Buffer takes the respondsibility of driving the interconects off the Op amps ...

Because the load on the Op amp is less and more stable ...

They don't overload when a demanding passage comes along driving the negative feedback loop into oscillation

The player I use is a Ayre D1xe ... Class A no neg F/B FET analog out and an external power supply with Galvanic isolation between audio and video ... inductor choke input as well as caps for common and diff mode nose at the IEC

The dacs on the Ayre are seldom used multi bit ladder dac style ... 1704K Burr Brown ...

@Daverhab: Great post! Yes, the power supply is VERY important. One of the best DACs I've ever heard was the Altmann Attraction (battery powered). That DAC allows the music to flow.

Krell is also using Sabre chips in their Processors, which contain DAC functionality among other features. Unfortunately, Krell does not produce dedicated external DACs ...

my review of this dac appears on audiophilia.com. i welcome any feedback.

i may sell my ps audio perfect wave tdac, but i shall try a copper hdmi cable before taking such action.

it is a great product. i have experimented with digital cable and don't hear huge differences between, coax, xlr and toslink.