just brought it home
it is set up and configured
and was WELL WORTH the wait
after much agonizing and evaluating the e22 has landed safely
i listened and demo'd the Chord Hugo, Mytek 192, M2Tech Young DSD, Auralic Vega, and Wyred4Sound and when it came down to it eXaSound won.
the battle was tough and came down to the wire with the Auralic and Wyred4Sound. What clinched it for me was the following:
1, portability
2, external/universal power supply
3, integration with Apple remote
4, the GLORIOUS sound
i love my dear little FOSTEX HP-A4 to death, but with the e22 in the room, its much like the school bully who pockets your lunch money - NO COMPETITION. That being said the HP-A4 is going to be at home with my desktop computer system and since it powered over USB, i'll take it with me on my travels.
There are bargains to be had in the world of HiFI - and at £1300 the Wyred4Sound DAC2-DSD can be considered one of them. Another product from Canada btw.
It is all good clean fun. What you are doing in effect is outsourcing what your dac would do anyway in terms of upsampling and filtering (unless it is a NOS dac).Oversampling with the e22 using Audirvana Plus and HQPlayer3 had yielded some interesting results:
1, if you're going to oversample to DSD256 you need some real fire/horse power in your computer - oversampling to DSD128 using poly-sinc 2s filter on HQPlayer3 somewhat more forgiving and does add to the 16/44 experience - it has to be heard, cannot be described - and then it is a "subjective" call on the part of the listener
2 oversampling in PCM with Audirvana Plus up to 384000 not such a bad thing either, it would appear to a heightened spatial quality, akin to oversampling with DSD
these are merely observations on my part - i implore others to oversample and listen for themselves - harmless fun
In the case of upsampling to DSD much of the above is true but it's more complicated because it will depend how the dac actually does the conversion of DSD. You may possibly be making the dac chip swap modes from multi-bit delta sigma to single bit conversion, or keeping it in single bit conversion but outsourcing all the work, or you might forcing the dac to reconvert the data back to something else.
Any road up, I think that the option to play around with these things is part of the fun of computer audio.
just brought it home
it is set up and configured
and was WELL WORTH the wait
after much agonizing and evaluating the e22 has landed safely
i listened and demo'd the Chord Hugo, Mytek 192, M2Tech Young DSD, Auralic Vega, and Wyred4Sound and when it came down to it eXaSound won.
the battle was tough and came down to the wire with the Auralic and Wyred4Sound. What clinched it for me was the following:
1, portability
2, external/universal power supply
3, integration with Apple remote
4, the GLORIOUS sound
i love my dear little FOSTEX HP-A4 to death, but with the e22 in the room, its much like the school bully who pockets your lunch money - NO COMPETITION. That being said the HP-A4 is going to be at home with my desktop computer system and since it powered over USB, i'll take it with me on my travels.