Well, you’re right probably. Two factors here:
- all AN speakers are in fact for corner positioning, not just somewhere in the room. It energies everything a bit more
- it’s not prohibited to use Rel anyway if one feels there’s a benefit
Audio Note DACs
- Thread starter Columbo
- Start date
Well, you’re right probably. Two factors here:
- all AN speakers are in fact for corner positioning, not just somewhere in the room. It energies everything a bit more
- it’s not prohibited to use Rel anyway if one feels there’s a benefit
Love both. In fact my current Naim setup is with AN speakers. Those are kind of majors of the industry. And most important factor for me is not technology behind (tube or solid state, cd or streaming) but the fact they do not lie their audience about an upgrade path. So if Naim or AN sound feels right for a particular user, one can feel comfortable about what manufacturer says. But to check still.
Toslink is the most jittery of connections.....unless someone's doing something very special. Egs?
darrenyeats
pfm Member
Nice song BTW.
darrenyeats
pfm Member
Agreed. This can be handled very well with PLL re-clocking. Conventional DACs often use ASRC chips - ASRC doesn't seem ideal to me but it's down to implementation, some work well enough.
E.g. Wadax use some new spec optical (not TOSLINK?)
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tuga
Legal Alien
Several DACs measured by Stereophile show identical low jitter levels with Toslink, Coax and USB but none of them is a NOS DAC.
They must be reclocking I guess
darrenyeats
pfm Member
Some have measurably lower output jitter with TOSLINK e.g. Benchmark DAC2 and DAC3. I think due to the reclocking/resampling dealing with input jitter, combined with less electrical interference, due to the optical link.
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Emcee
Iconoclast
I kept my Ares for exactly 2 days before selling it. Couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.He was impressed with a zero, it says somethingFirst, Denafrips Ares is a worst dac I ever had, so that’s a bit compromised comparison by design. I listened to AN dacs level 1, 2, 5 and 4.1x player (not 3 unfortunately yet). Many believe Dac 2.1Sig is a sweet spot in terms of value for money.
Fretbuzz
pfm Member
Had an AN 1x DAC. Quite an eye opener in terms of any specs-/numbers-based ideas about digital. At least for musical enjoyment.
Hearing their upper DACs in demos or show systems never fails to impress either. Always sound so right somehow - personally. Definitely the way I'd go in an alternative world of space and dosh...
Hearing their upper DACs in demos or show systems never fails to impress either. Always sound so right somehow - personally. Definitely the way I'd go in an alternative world of space and dosh...
CTank
pfm Member
No idea about sound quality, as I hesitated and missed out on the one on here recently. But I measured up, and to fit in my cabinet, it would need to go in sideways. It’s physically much bigger than I anticipated from photos.
Roog
pfm Member
Having owned an AN DAC One and compared it with a bunch of more current tech I would say that it was hampered by its small value output coupling capacitor which meant that I have to be careful about coupling to equipment with equally high impendence input stage for fear of rolling off the bass. I did have a chat with AN's tech dep't and they offered some suggested mods, but caveated this advice with "it probably wont help much because the circuit can only provide limited drive".
I would agree that the AN DAC I had was best matched with equipment of similar design philosophy.
Overall I didn't think there was anything special about the DAC, it used an old R2R chip DAC and added a simple single stage valve buffer using a tiny 'valve mic tube'. I suspect that the Philips tube was probably designed for miniature/ military applications. And as I say it the circuit is sensitive to what you connect it to and how you load it. I note that the industry has been pushing low impedance output stages for some time proabably in the pursuit of low noise and ease of matching.
Given that in my view there are so many sorted DACs available, I most recently bought my DAC based on feature set rather than topology.
As for AN's HiFi show rooms, I felt that ANs rooms generally sounded good, probably because of their choice of music which was usually very simple often involving single instruments or quartets, their systems didn't produce much bass and thus didn't excite the rooms' poor acoustic characteristics. Not a bad strategy in my opinion and certainly much better than blasting the audience with bass or penetrating highs.
I would agree that the AN DAC I had was best matched with equipment of similar design philosophy.
Overall I didn't think there was anything special about the DAC, it used an old R2R chip DAC and added a simple single stage valve buffer using a tiny 'valve mic tube'. I suspect that the Philips tube was probably designed for miniature/ military applications. And as I say it the circuit is sensitive to what you connect it to and how you load it. I note that the industry has been pushing low impedance output stages for some time proabably in the pursuit of low noise and ease of matching.
Given that in my view there are so many sorted DACs available, I most recently bought my DAC based on feature set rather than topology.
As for AN's HiFi show rooms, I felt that ANs rooms generally sounded good, probably because of their choice of music which was usually very simple often involving single instruments or quartets, their systems didn't produce much bass and thus didn't excite the rooms' poor acoustic characteristics. Not a bad strategy in my opinion and certainly much better than blasting the audience with bass or penetrating highs.
Their room was one of my favourites at bristol earlier this year. Played interesting music, not too loud, sounded natural.
I'm currently in the market for a dac to be used with my bluesound 2i and 0.1x could be a contender. But slightly put off by some comments suggesting that it needs to be fed by a top class transport tho.
I'm currently in the market for a dac to be used with my bluesound 2i and 0.1x could be a contender. But slightly put off by some comments suggesting that it needs to be fed by a top class transport tho.
