PS Audio Direct Stream

.
Notes below are from someone on AudioShark that just got his DirectStream DAC.

Drivers loaded......player playing (easy) !! First song "out of the box" impressions........(drum roll).......Diana Krall "Live In Paris" now sounds like she IS SITTING at her piano. This made an immediate impression. The distance/placement to one another was real, and it made me take notice. Piano strikes are very, very real in tone. Nice first song. OK, I will kick back and listen for a bit. I will send some more updates tonight, as things gel.

More first hour notes. FINALLY.....a real hi-hat sound. As a drummer for 20 years, I finally heard an absolutely "real sounding" hi-hat, my first ever....via a stereo system. There is such a beautifully gentle sound quality to a hi-hat, as you compress and release the two cymbals via the foot pedal. It was there in spades on one of the tracks of the Best Audiophile Voices l CD. I cannot stop noticing minute details that flesh out as real sounding.....that I do not remember hearing before. I heard what sounded like very low volume oscillating (sp ?)sound, from a B-3 organ.....that was never there before.
A trumpet player squeezed off a note, and you could hear the note decay and fall apart.....bit by bit. I guess I should qualify all the above by stating that I am also using a "new, never before used" USB cable that Paul (PS Audio) suggested. It is the J-CAT cable, from the company making J-PLAY boards. So that could be contributing somewhat to the combination, who knows ?? But I have a few other USB cables of which, I am familiar with none.
I am having trouble just listening to the music, because exciting little details keep revealing themselves. The soundstage opened up immediately after a couple of songs. Presentation seems a tad closer, which I normally don't prefer. But this DAC is sounding very "small club intimate" in nature on vocal tracks. Very enticing for sure. The depth has gotten a few feet deeper as well. Kinda strange, as soundstage depth usually gets a tad less deep.....when the presentation moves forward.
Sound ??? First hour is showing a more full, robust sound. I do notice the "building blocks" of notes, voices, etc. as they are formed and decay.......if that makes sense ?? Sort of like using a magnifying glass on the music. You can hear more of the individual minute parts that make up each word, note and sound. I do notice a few more warts as well in the mix. Definitely not a step backwards in SQ so far. Will do some more listening, and give a few more impressions this evening. Stay tuned.....

More notes: great snap/attack on percussion, more defined "pluck" on bass notes, very natural overall sound. Sound stage can go very wide if mixed that way. There seems to be a greater number of layers in the sound stage depth. Some recordings sound like the lead singer and bass player are singing/playing from the middle of the bass drum (in other words....a very mono, one dimensional perspective). This DAC breaks up this perspective into many smaller depths, giving each performer more space. The reverb trails seem longer, deeper, and wider.
One aspect that is a bit un-nerving is when there are several instruments/vocals going on all at once. This DAC brings forth better separation and detail of these multiple things happening, and my brain is not used to processing so much detail/info. Sort of like walking into a room with 50 people all talking at once. Usually you perceive this as noise. Now imagine hearing every conversation individually, and understanding every word......all at the same time. Takes a bit more work for your brain to computate what you just heard. I hope everybody can understand my descriptions. I am not so good with the audiophile techno-speak descriptos. Back to listening....more later.

.

Thanks Mitch4t, First real user opinion. I really appreciate it. Mine is due in June, I ordered it by blind faith. (Usually not a good thing.)

If you visit the PS Audio Forum, there are some early user reviews of the DirectStream. Very positive so far.

.
Ozzy, blind faith is a fact of life in high-end audio today. Finding someone that stocks this stuff in a brick & mortar store is very rare.
.

Pacific Northwest Audio Society meeting tonight.

Ted Smith presents discrete DSD DAC to PNWAS
Ted Smith is a longtime friend of PNWAS and was the lead designer of the new PS Audio DirectStream DAC.

Over three years ago, Ted presented an early prototype of this DAC. I remembered liking it a LOT, and members asked if it would ever get into production. It is a discrete DSD-based DAC. All of the input processing, upsampling, DSP and DSD conversion is done in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA; a type of software configurable hardware). The analog output is a purely passive filter based on transformers. In the PS Audio unit, the digital and analog boards Ted designed are direct replacements for the boards in a current PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC or Perfect Wave DAC Mark II, enabling a field upgrade for owners of these units, to a DirectStream DAC.

One feature of the FPGA input processing is that there are no PLLs (phase loop locks): the bits are pattern matched to figure out what’s coming in and then they are placed into a buffer. In a sense, all inputs are locked at all times. You can go from input to input seamlessly and you can change sample rates of incoming material seamlessly. Most importantly, you can go from PCM to DSD seamlessly. This architecture also leads to a very low susceptibility to incoming jitter. I2S, AES/EBU, S/PDIF and TOSLink within their bandwidths all sound the same. For 96k and below, optical TOSLink can sound better since it can eliminate ground loops.

All digital inputs are upsampled to wide words at 28.224 MHz (10 x the DSD rate!). Then that signal is sigma delta modulated to double rate DSD and then lowpass filtered.

The upsampling filters are chosen to keep as much detail as possible not for computing convenience: they use a lot of CPU power, but the FPGA has the resources to do a great job. The result is that the FPGA digital processing looses less audio information than most other designs.

Ted will be present to talk and answer questions about the DAC.

A couple of Executive Committee members have already heard this DAC and they have reported that it sounds really great. Everything in the DAC was designed to get your toes tapping, to allow you to enjoy all the music you already have. The DirectStream DAC uncovers more music than we knew was present in any of our sources, from Redbook to hi-rez PCM, to DSD.

As usual - visitors and guests welcome.

Thursday, May 8th. 7:30pm
Mercer Island Congregational Church (basement)
4545 Island Crest Way
Mercer Island, WA 98040