Audio Note DACs

[the_bat]

If you don’t oversample you can’t get an accurate reconstruction of signal.
With NOS you get the famous stairsteps instead of a smooth curve. This is from a CD-4.1x:

Audio Note CD players and DACs may sound good to some people but the engineering design is poor (as evidenced by their measured performance), putting out a 'tinted', lower fidelity version of the recording.

That waveform is due to the deliberate lack of a digital reconstruction filter, not the fact it's not oversampling.

 

[Roog]

That waveform is due to the deliberate lack of a digital reconstruction filter, not the fact it's not oversampling.

And whether someone prefers the sound this makes or not, that waveform is not representative of the signal the DAC was given.

Whilst playing with Lampizator modifications of TDA1540 and 1541 circuits you get the same effect from his circuits. For some reason he did not mention this in his web site articles.

 

[sq225917]

The lack of effective reconstruction filter is due to the lack of oversampling, all nos dacs look like that.

NOS vs. Digital Filtering DACs: Exploring filtering turned off, implications, fidelity and subjective audibility. (Recent BorderPatrol DAC chatter...)

A blog for audiophiles about more objective topics. Measurements of audio gear. Reasonable, realistic, no snakeoil assessment of sound, and equipment.

archimago.blogspot.com

 

[Phyztech]

Story continues:

 

[sq225917]

It's not an R2R ladder chip. To quote ThorstenL.

Yes, they are "multibit" Chips, however their operation internally drastically differs from R2R Architectures, by using a mixture of active switched current sources for the lower bits and multiemitter transistor current dividers for the upper bits. The operation methods between R2R and the Philips devices could not be more different.

 

[darrenyeats]

Nagra, Meitner, Playback designs also using their optical links

MSB Director too, it turns out.