forum.zelfbouwaudio.nl

nemreh schreef:

Volgens mij komt er een fantastische DAC aan welke momenteel in testfase is en binnenkort leverbaar komt.
Een samenwerking tussen Sparkoslab en Allo.
Het uiteindelijke ontwerp maakt gebruik van een ES9038Q2M

Artikel:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/vendor-s ... m-rpi.html

Foto's:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/attachme ... ana-02-pdf
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/attachme ... pam-03-pdf

democles schreef:

Nog 2 dagen en dan komt eindelijk de nieuwe Katana dac van ALLo op de markt.(als het goed is )

I guess I could. First, hopefully things will turn out well in the end for Katana. I sure hope so because we sure seem to need a very good and accessible DAC at an affordable price.

What we did here was set up three dacs all playing the same music through a very low, SOA low distortion power amp. if there is any distortion at all it will be audible. The first dac is a Benchmark DAC-3 which is a well known reference standard. The second was a modified Chinese ES9038Q2M dac I have been describing in another thread over here: ES9038Q2M Board (So far, nobody has modded one of those dacs as much as I have because it is a lot of work, too much work for pretty much everyone, it seems.) The third dac was Katana.

Because the manual for Katana said it sounds best with 3 power supplies, and because it just says the power supplies should be 5v, 4A, I took that literally as follows: The RPi was powered by its original wall wart supply, the wire leads from the Katana board were connected to a clean linear 5v supply, and the USB connector on the microcontroller was connected to a 5v wall wart switcher. Thought I would try that first, at least.

The dacs were level matched with an SPL meter reasonably close. Two listeners compared all the dacs against each other as much as they wanted and they could adjust the volume levels up and down for comparison purposes as they wished. Both listeners ranked the dacs in this way: 1) Dac-3, 2)Modded Chinese dac, and 3)Katana.

It was noticed that Katana sounded the most different of the three, with a full, round midrange, but some unnatural distortion at higher frequencies such as cymbal sounds.

So, cdsgames and I exchanged a few emails. I described the findings and asked about possible power supply issues. Before I had a chance to exactly describe each of the power supplies I was using, I got an email back saying they had found a problem and were working on it.

That's all I know at this point.

The only thing I am really sort eager to find out when the updated firmware is available is whether the dac rankings will change and my modded dac will come in third, or maybe it will be a tie. It would probably be best for virtually everyone if I could honestly say Kantana comes in 2nd place. There is no way it can beat DAC-3, but if it could beat my modded dac it will be a very good dac, very possibly the best dac under $1,000 as cdsgames would like it to be. At $250 it would be steal, IMHO. Assuming that happens, of course.

Leeuwarden schreef:

Zo te lezen is het alweer zo goed als opgelost...

3kes schreef:

En hoe zijn de bevindingen? Hier draait nu de Audiophonics ES9023TCXO dac, dat klinkt fantastisch. En dat voor een prima prijs.