Older is better - D/A chip?

Ghost - Thanks for the history, but I'm aware of it.

Many D/A chips do not give you the choice of avoiding the digital filtering, so the D/A chip does force this much of the time, and they auto-select the filter for each sample-rate. This simply sounds bad, not so much because of the digital filtering, because the digital filter implementations are so poor. If these were ideal, it would be great and the NOS DACs would not have such a following IMO.

But we live in a non-ideal world. I personally have had mostly poor audio experiences with typical digital filtering. This is why I made it selectable in my own DAC design. It is better IME to use more analog filtering instead.

However, I recently heard a DAC that had reasonable digital filter design, and that is the W4S DAC2 using the Sabre chip. This was using the I2S input on it driven from an Off-Ramp. World-Class SQ.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Elberoth - the Metrum Octave is a great piece. Many of my customers have one, but they also tell me that many of them cannot playback 176.4 or 192. Does yours?

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Some of the newer DACs have addressed the pre/post-ringing in the impulse response with minimum phase and apodizing filters. Ayre, with the Wolfram chip, documents that well. SACD also got that much improved. Another star goes to the dithered digital volume control of Audiolab, Amarra and probably others, which often depend on upsampling.

Helped play around with DIY NOS DACs (stacking was the trend back then) with friends and while many people that listened thought it was better, I thought it was "romantic" sounding and less than honest although it was impossible to explain how. Haven't heard much of the commercial NOS products.

Yes, I'm the lucky one - mine does 192kHz, no problem. Waiting for the HEX now.