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Audio Note DACs

Yes I guess but I would unpack that!

A good DAC should be resistant to input jitter and electrical interference. I would class this sort of thing like power supply noise. A better DAC shouldn't highlight crud, instead it should suppress it.

On the other hand, the better the DAC, amp, speakers, room etc. the more likely you are to hear tiny things that you didn't before, in general. Ideally these should be just tiny differences in the music signal path. But I accept life isn't perfect so, maybe unavoidably to some degree, you hear crud too - but it's not an *aim* to hear crud, rather the opposite.
 
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Surely a good dac should be impervious the psu quality and largely the same to input signal quality.
 
Roog said:
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.
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It almost sounds like they deliberately cripple the performance of the lower tiers…
 
There’s not a lot of research on audibility of less relevant things like the effects of aftermarket PSUs, a rather futile quest considering the immense variety available and of different equipment which may or may not benefit from one.
Some of the available research has very small samples and sometimes inadequate methodology.

Without controlled testing one cannot factually state that some of the differences we hear are there, and many of those differences are slight anyway.
So it’s up to the individual to decide on whether it’s worth investing in usually very expensive aftermarket products.
To make matters more complicated some people prefer a less accurate reproduction of the signal, an ‘enhanced’ presentation but either side claiming they are right is factually wrong.
 
tuga said:
It almost sounds like they deliberately cripple the performance of the lower tiers…
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When I spoke with the AN tech it felt like they were more or less disowning the 'DAC One' not made in the UK and 'oh that model includes a filter!' like that's a bad thing.

They also felt that the Philips tubes used in that DAC were very long lived and that it wasnt worth me changing it, it is soldered in.

Regarding deliberately crippling their lower Tier products, I believe that this is a thing with some brands, sad but....
 
Roog said:
and 'oh that model includes a filter!' like that's a bad thing.
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Well, that’s in a heart of AN dac philosophy - you simply cannot improve the sound with any filtering options, only degrade. It’s a totally different approach vs let’s say Chord ‘reconstruction’ and oversampling.

Whether you agree or not in a particular system is another question :)
 
Earlier AN DACs had an analogue filter which caused some treble cut and phase effects. They always sounded better with this removed. I don't know if they stopped the practice, whose objective was to cut aliasing
 
Phyztech said:
Well, that’s in a heart of AN dac philosophy - you simply cannot improve the sound with any filtering options, only degrade. It’s a totally different approach vs let’s say Chord ‘reconstruction’ and oversampling.

Whether you agree or not in a particular system is another question :)
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Indeed, I had a chat with Peter Quortrup at the Bristol show a few years ago, he told me he was dabbling with 12 bit conversion DACs.
 
Gza said:
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.
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Yes AN DACs rely on a very good upstream transport because they do not re-clock (up-sample or anything to process the digital signal). It's their ethos.
 
It's odd how some DAC manufactures like to process the signal to the nth degree, and others believe that processing the signal is not a good thing.

Streamers too - SOtM with their sMS-200 and latest software updates have given you the option to reduce the processing power of the internal computer to improve sound quality!! Other streamers like to brag their faster computational processing power.

I think SW1X with their latest and only streamer ensure that processing power is minimal.

But sorry - this is a bit of a distraction from AN DACs.
 
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