Allnic 5000DAC

Before I read the review, I thought maybe Allnic took the Audio Note approach of not filtering the digital datastream, which would lead to some poor measurements. I was frankly surprised that the Allnic employed upsampling and other digital manipulations and measure that badly.

So the reviewer said it was the best-sounding digital he ever heard, and JA said it was the worst-measuring digital he ever saw. Go figure. IMO, that reviewer was not qualified to review this product, as his experience with digital was extremely limited. His preference is analog and his digital consists of a $450 Halide dac. Also, as Lula pointed out, it appears that the Allnic was only reviewed via the USB input, and there could potentially be large differences, for better or worse, using a transport through the SPDIF input or whatever.

Having owned the D5000 for the last 5 months, I encourage everyone reading this thread not to dismiss this dac based on the Stereophile review.

After reviewing the article and researching some background regarding the physical dac used by Stereophile, I am somewhat perplexed myself.

The D5000 was first bench tested by John Atkinson, then reviewed by Art Dudley. As we have read, there is a significant discordance between the actual bench test and the reviewer's cerebral perception. I have no desire to be critical of either the approach or perception. This unit may simply demonstrate that the bench tests performed by Mr. Atkinson, while producing accurate measurement, do not translate to poor sonic qualities.

Could DHT tubes by nature test poorly?

The unit was returned to Korea and found to have 3 faulty DHT tubes, is suspected to have been damaged in shipping. This obviously can not be confirmed. Allnic has requested Mr. Atkinson to re-test with a different unit.

Interestingly, I had one DHT tube fail myself after 350-450 hours and observed no sonic degradation. Replacing the tube was easy and took only a few minutes.

On the first paragraph of Mr. Atkinson's review states "Apple's USB prober utility identified the processor as the 'D-5000' from 'ALLNIC SOUND' with the serial-number string 'USB' and confirmed that the USB input operated in the isochronous asynchronous mode." I did not read in the review: isochronous adaptive mode.

I spoke with the head engineer who also confirmed USB asynchronous mode, with similar traffic behavior to the XMOS chipset, although the standard UAC 2.0 is their own proprietary design with galvanic isolation.

I will post my thoughts of the dac itself soon. To my ears and those around me, it best EMM DAC2x. I also had less issues with the XMOS driver, which is used in both units.

Both the D5000 and the Empirical Overdrive SE loaded are wonderful dacs, each with their own qualities. If you desire DSD playback, I recommend auditioning this dac.

Sunil at Careaudio has a Allnic demo program. Mattenship will be auditioning the D5000 on his audiogon blog and I am curious to compare notes with his shootout with Empirical.

I own both dacs. If you are in my geographic region, you are welcome to listen for yourself.

Ketcham, thanks for your input. Note, however, that the reference earlier in the thread to isochronous adaptive mode, which was in my post, pertained to an Art Dudley review of a Lector DAC, not to the review of the Allnic.

Regards,
-- Al

Al,

My apologies for taking your quote completely out of reference.

I wish Audiogon would allow display of all comments simultaneously instead of refreshing the page showing only one comment.

J

3A5 are tiny DHT tubes. Is that an explanation why they are failing so much?

In the L7 Lampi, I can use 101ds, 2A3, 6A3, 300b, 45,VT52, 5b4g, etc and these seem way more robust (2.5v to 6.3v). It also seems like the bigger the tube the airier the sound. Rectis give even more rolling possibilities, as 5Y3, 5u4g,5R4, 274b, 422a, GZ34/37, 83v and 80 with adapters, U52, etc and they influence the sound enormously.

Tube rolling the Dac is loads of fun and one drawback of the Allnic is that you are stuck with the 3a5 as output tubes (2.8v). Can you at least roll the rectis?

In any case, I dont doubt that it sounds great. I would not pay much attention to the test bench report, as your ears will tell know all you need to know.