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Sonic Studio 302 (aka Metric Halo ULN-2)
I've owned this piece now for a few weeks and have been pretty tight lipped on the sonics publicly. After a few weeks of use in my system damn if this isn't the best dac I've owned. Higher resolution than any of the dacs I've had in the house, greater frequency extension, no top end glare, great tone and just reports the new and does not seem to editorialize.
In the house now are 4 dacs and the Sonic Studio 302 takes top honors. I've got an esoteric here on loan, my modded TranDac and the Apogee Duet. I was first turned on to the Metric Halo unit by Ironbut right around the time of the VSAC event. I researched the living crap out of pro audio dacs for a while and it kept coming back to this one (at least in my budget of sub $2k). I looked at the apogee rosetta 200, weiss dac 2 , lavry DA11 and the RME Fireface 800. Well after reading I eliminated the apogee as the reviews were pretty evenly split between both the Metric Halo and the Apogee and the Metric Halo has mic pre amps which could come in handy acting as a gain stage for direct to ADC needle drops, once I pick up the RIAA eq plug in for my unit. The RME unit held promise until I tried a fireface 400 and could not get it work with my mac after several attempts. When I brought it back to Guitar Center the guy there told me I was the second person to bring in the RME for not working out of the box that week. I quickly nixed the RME from my list and that left the Weiss and Lavy. I really like the Lavry and several people I know own either the DA10 or DA11 but after doing the math the Metric Halo was still tops with its ADC section. I still lust after the Weiss but can't get over the fact that I need to buy a separate ADC unit to perform needle drops.
Well I set off to buy the Metric Halo used and kept missing them used both on Ebay and Craigslist but lucked out and found the Sonic Studio branded UNL-2 locally.
I am listening to the unit right now and I swear it has made my digital section come close to my analog section, something I thought would take a few years and much more $$$$ to do.
The unit has a built in headphone amp that works very well with the Grado HF-2s and surprisingly the JH13s but I think might suck with Senn 650s, 800s or AKG 702s. Through both my headphones and my speaker rig it has brought the level of transparency up several notches. There is a presence that I have not heard yet from digital that spooky was that the record or was that sound in real life thing happens much more with this dac.
The big bonus for me are the inputs as there are mic preamps with 70db of gain as well as passive inputs with trim pots in case the signal is too hot you can take a few db off. This is really killer for me as I love to digitize my records. I may end up using this as a digital phono preamp in the future once I get some plugs to load the cart.
Any way if you are in the market for a dac that works great as a computer interface you should really check one of these out. There are also coax and optical inputs if you want to come from a cd transport.
I would gladly throw this in the ring with other dacs in it's price class up to 3-4 thousand. Now I recently heard the Amarra model 4 (metric halo unl-8 without mic pre amps) and that was really special and highly recommended if you have $6-8K. The UNL-2 is $1700 new from MH and can go to $2400 with optional DSP.
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Originally Posted by boomana
is a serious step up from this but at 3-4 times the price it's something for me to aspire to someday rather than think about owning today.
