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£100 DAC beats Klimax Renew DS

Hi,

Interesting post from the OP both on here and the Linn forum.

I think if you have found something that to your ears is better than your Klimax DS then you should sell that and use your £100 DAC and be happy.

After all you want MQA, you want a better control point, you prefer the sound and the control point to the Klimax DS system.

Cheers

John
 
I have the Meridian 2, most £100-200 non-MQA DACs will walk all over it. Some bargains to be had on the second hand market.

If you want to to buy it (say £50 inc shipping) I can pop it in a padded envelope and ship.
 
My understanding is MQA are remastered albums not available in other formats, so you cannot really compare them.
 
Musical Fidelity comes to mind.
SMSL has some really low cost options.
Schiit Modi, only about £100
iFi
 
using 82 with superlink mod, TPSC, 2 x 250 / Kudos C2 ... so no, not earbuds!

Whenever I tried a laptop (dell xps 15/sony vaio 13) as a source it was degrading sound massively, flat, lack of dynamic . Even with conversion to DSD256 via Ayon CD35 dac it was far worst compared to normal CD. Tried Mytek brooklyn with MQA via laptop and it sounds worst than linn kds1 or ayon cd.
 
If you like MQA, you could use Roon to conduct software decoding, as I believe they added Linn DS support recently.
 
MQA is around 17/60, so lossy if the master resolution was anything above 16/44.1.
This is a good read:

MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions.
February 25, 2018
Archimago, for Computer Audiophile

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/...-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/

That is not true. If you start with a 24/96 studio master and put it through the MQA encode/decode process you do not get the original 24/96 file. There is no dispute about this. MQA claim that the difference is inaudible, which it may be, but they accept that there is a difference. If you want genuine Studio Master quality you can either buy it from the likes of Linn and Hyperion and Qobuz, or stream it directly from Qobuz Sublime +. What seems particularly sneaky about MQA is that the undecoded MQA is worse than CD quality - about 13bits according to some.

Thanks for the links & explanation
 
If you like MQA, you could use Roon to conduct software decoding, as I believe they added Linn DS support recently.

Thanks for this suggestion, also suggested by someone on the Linn forum. I've installed the trial version of Roon & playing Tidal masters through my DS from Roon definitely sounds better than my £100 DAC
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I'm still getting my head round Roon - it seems to make its own decisions about artwork & other meta data & I ignore the meta data in my files. I've discovered than I can go in an edit that on an album by album basis - is there a global setting to prefer the file data?

The other thing compared to the Tidal app - I like using the track radio function to introduce me to new music asked on the selected seed track, where Roon seems to only play similar tracks from my library so I get nothing new
sad.gif
- is there a way to force Roon to ignore my library?
 
I think if you have found something that to your ears is better than your Klimax DS then you should sell that and use your £100 DAC and be happy.

After all you want MQA, you want a better control point, you prefer the sound and the control point to the Klimax DS system.

John - with the same source file be that 16/44.1 or 24/192 or anything in between the DS sounds significantly better, as you would expect. However, my frustration & the point I'm making is that, when Tidal offers hi res via MQA - decoding this with the Tidal desktop app & outputting through my £100 dac, sounds better than the 16/44.1 version through the DS
 
No need to be sarcastic...

I'm serious. Have you tried the comparison using another unit?

Yes, sounds the same, tried the plus that sounds the same too.

I run it with an lt3083 into four parallel lt3045 psu, that made a tiny difference.
 
John - with the same source file be that 16/44.1 or 24/192 or anything in between the DS sounds significantly better, as you would expect. However, my frustration & the point I'm making is that, when Tidal offers hi res via MQA - decoding this with the Tidal desktop app & outputting through my £100 dac, sounds better than the 16/44.1 version through the DS

Hi,

While that maybe true, I doubt very much that Linn will be introducing MQA into their DS range, so my point stands, either accept what the issue is or use whichever one you prefer, or both.

Cheers

John
 
Yes, sounds the same, tried the plus that sounds the same too.

I run it with an lt3083 into four parallel lt3045 psu, that made a tiny difference.

Ok. I guess that reinforces the idea that the way one listens to recorded music and what one values can be really disparate.
 
Anyone wanting to try a cheap dac, look on ebay, there are many between £5 - 30 and add on a cheap Chinese lpsu £40 - 50, you can then decide if your expensive dac was worth the money.
 


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