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The John Westlake/Lakewest MDAC/FDAC, VFET and Detox

Thanks Timcat. Good news - I took davidjt's advice rather than yours, bought an Uptone Regen (£75) and it has made a small but unequivocal improvement to my MDAC.

Bad news - it has completely screwed up my playing of Qobuz from Win10 to my MDAC. Most tracks swap to a lower bit rate (according to the MDAC's display) immediately or after ~20 seconds. Weird.

I suspect the driver that Windows installed when I first connected the Regen. But I can now not find this driver in Device Manager, so cannot delete it, and generally am not sure how to proceed. Or, perhaps it's some other problem entirely.

Has anyone heard of problems with Regen and MDAC? Any suggestions please how I should go about configuring the Qobuz application, or Windows, with this new driver. Or other ideas?

(It's not an MDAC problem - it still works fine over coax from a RPi.)

Sorry, I can't help you with this one, as I don't use Windows or the Uptone.
 
Hello gang! What's the consensus please, all these years on, as to whether the MDAC warrants experiments/faffing around with USB regeneration accessories (eg. Uptone)? I have always assumed that John did a good-enough job on the MDAC for add-ons not to be necessary. Has anyone of us discovered a reasonably-priced decrapifier (other than the one we paid to develop!) which works unambiguously well with the MDAC?

Thing is this, I have had many people say NO, but on my M-DAC I installed the Hoerwege (https://www.hoer-wege.de/) kit and tbh, nothing has beat it to date, it is simply insanely good. I mean it is so good that there is not DAC I have found at any price point that will better it significantly (which is really going to piss off a lot of people).
 
That homepage is heavy on words and not very intuitive to navigate. Apart from that the costs involved are not neglible for some of the modifications. But I suppose that "Hoerwege" deliver what they promise to do.
 
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Thanks guys. I guess the answer to my question "what is the consensus" has been helpfully answered by you guys - the consensus is: yes in some cases, no in others. Which I guess is what I expected.

But if the consensus had been "yes, this is just what the MDAC needs" or "no, after 5 years no one has really noticed an unambiguous difference on the MDAC", then I would have taken a different (purchasing) route.

At the risk of repeating an old discussion, I guess we all know that the benefit depends completely not only upon the DAC, but on the streamer/PC, and on the situation with your mains supply.

A philosophical thought from me: digital audio so nearly makes hi fi cheap and easy in 2020 - broadband is far faster than we need in 80%/90%/95% of cases, storage is effectively free, hi-res is readily-available from Qobuz at the cost of only one CD per month, Raspberry Pi control/networking/transcoding is more than sufficent, and cheap as chips. Given all these magical gifts in the last 10 years, who would have predicted that noise and jitter would be such a stubborn, insidious challenge that most DAC manufacturers still have not found a way to build protection against it into their products.
 
I suffer from neither with my £500 dac from Gustard. Since at -118db and jitter at- 140db


Its just a none issue with decent days.
 
Yes Merry Christmas,

la la la la la! Santa's on his way,
la la la la la la, with my MDAC2,
la la la la la la! and Some VFETs too
la la la la la la!

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La la la la arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

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Yes, DPD are about to deliver to me an RME ADI-2 DAC FS. It's about the same price as I expected to pay for MDAC2 (£838). Similar functionality. And will probably sound very similar?
 
I went down the SMSL M400 route.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../smsl-m400-balanced-usb-mqa-dac-review.13732/
It measures the same as the Bruno Putzeys designed £10K Mola Mola DAC..

Around £ 700 with MQA for those who believe in such (I would have preferred a £ 100 discount)

It is considerably better than the MDAC with a 5 rail Diy power supply.

The USB input with the latest Xmos chip and Thesycon ASIO driver means that it is basically immune to noise and jitter from the source.
I feed it from a £ 150 Chinese NUC fitted with a 1TB SSD.

Superb.
 
The thread that Refuses To Die....

I'm so relieved to have moved on, being down only a couple of hundred I reckon, but there's added entertainment and life experience value from it....

tbh I'm not now so convinced that it's worth chasing improvements in DACs, as all the DACs I've heard in recent times have been very, very close, without big enough differences to make me consider changing. I'm sure I'd reap 50x the benefit from the same money spent on room treatment, if only I could sneak them past the FPO....
 
I went down the SMSL M400 route.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../smsl-m400-balanced-usb-mqa-dac-review.13732/
It measures the same as the Bruno Putzeys designed £10K Mola Mola DAC..

Around £ 700 with MQA for those who believe in such (I would have preferred a £ 100 discount)

It is considerably better than the MDAC with a 5 rail Diy power supply.

The USB input with the latest Xmos chip and Thesycon ASIO driver means that it is basically immune to noise and jitter from the source.
I feed it from a £ 150 Chinese NUC fitted with a 1TB SSD.

Superb.


Another fantastic dac for the same money
https://www.rme-audio.de/adi-2-dac.html
 
The USB input with the latest Xmos chip and Thesycon ASIO driver means that it is basically immune to noise and jitter from the source.
I feed it from a £ 150 Chinese NUC fitted with a 1TB SSD.
Do I recall correctly Paul that you were seriously into experimenting with PSUs for the MDAC? And yet you reckon that nowadays, with the likes of the SMSL, that there's no need to be feeding it from low-noise streamers, or sourcing alternative power supplies etc?
 
I went down the SMSL M400 route.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../smsl-m400-balanced-usb-mqa-dac-review.13732/
It measures the same as the Bruno Putzeys designed £10K Mola Mola DAC..
The ASR mantra is if it measure better it will sound better. So all you will ever need is a Topping D9 or Benchmark DAC:rolleyes:
Even if two DACs measure the same does not necessarily mean that they sound the same unless you can measurer everything the ear can hear.
You might be right that the SMSL M400 is VFM.
 
Correct.
The SMSL has an onboard SMPS. Which cleans up the mains - no audio mains cable required - lol.
(though I do run it from a balanced mains transformer with DC blocker, as this powers the whole system)

Look at the figures. MDAC THD = 0.0015 %
M400 = 0.00006.

Dynamic range MDAC = 121.5 dB.
M400 = 131dB.

Look at the parts count, I was shocked. M400

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...e-new-smsl-m400.13447/#lg=post-403011&slide=0

MDAC.

https://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/media/audiolab/m-dac/silver/aud_mdac_slv_l_5-large.jpg

Then you realise that no parts means no 'noise'.(lol) Or that less components =less noise and more music.

The USB signal is cleaned and reclocked inside the DAC, I'm feeding it direct from a cheap Chinese NUC with it's standard SMPS.
I'm so pleased with sound I have not bothered trying a 'filthy' source, though the NUC cannot be that clean.
 


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