Home Source Components

This may be interesting, thoughts: http://www.psaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/DirectStream-DAC-white-paper.pdf http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2014/02/ps-audio-to-rescue-pcm-with-directstream-perfectwave-dac/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ps-audio-to-rescue-pcm-with-directstream-perfectwave-dac http://www.monoandstereo.com/2014/02/ps-audio-directstream-dac.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+monoandstereo%2FHOym+%28MONO+AND+STEREO+Ultra+High-End+Audio+Magazine%29

Just got the PS Audio Newsletter, this replaces the DL3. Looks pretty interesting..... http://www.psaudio.c...players/nuwave/

Just got the PS Audio newsletter, an interesting product coming soon. Phono Pre and A-D Converter. Snippets: Info on digital output

The PS Audio PerfectWave DAC is out: PerfectWave DAC : Product Details | PS Audio The DAC is 2995, but PS Audio is offering a trade-in until the end of May. If I understand correctly, send in your DAC and you will receive up to $1000 off (DAC trade-in value appears to be based on MSRP). Brings the unit to $1995. I'm still trying to piece together what exactly this thing does. Is this just a big gizmo, or does it seem like it could be something that sounds good?

I ordered one of these DACses and will post impressions, pics, and random musings here.

Interesting that PS Audio is still putting money into SACD at this point. I wonder if they are planning to release a new DAC as well:

I've been exchanging e-mail with Barrows over at PS Audio about the DL-III I have and how it handles high sample rate data streams through the SRC. He mentioned that PS Audio is looking to release a new Ultralink DAC.

http://www.psaudio.com/products/digital_link_iii_overview.asp Seriously, there's like nothing in there. Seems overpriced..

What's the best method of connecting transport to DAC via either spdif or aes/ebu encoding, in real life? I have the option of doing one of the following (from transport -> DAC): 1. BNC 75 -> RCA ~75 2. RCA ~75 -> RCA ~75 3. XLR 110 -> XLR 110 4. toslink -> toslink I have been going through my emag book and coax is theoretically the perfect medium at transmitting high-frequency signals over a length of 1M. I have been trying different combination with blue jeans cable, and they all sound different. So what's objectively the best connection in the real world?

This looks interesting: [url=http://www.kj-pub.com/productshopxp.asp?id=647]QA-550 WAV

Hey- Bit of a bummer. Got my Quad CDP-2 on Monday, and a problem manifested itself late Wednesday evening. Large amounts of distortion started coming out of the left channel. I tried everything: switching interconnects, switching inputs on my amp, different digital cables (even though the distortion is also present when playing a CD), different power cords, and different power outlets. The distortion is present out of both the fixed and variable outputs of the CDP-2. Its not the speakers, because my 840C and TT perform fine. The weird thing is the distortion doesn't show up until the player has been playing for 3-4 hours. I'm starting to feel crazy, because …

I currently have a X-Fi Elite pro containing the CS4398 DAC which it seems to share in common with headroom's ultra micro DAC. Is this an adequate DAC? Should I look to upgrade? I have a incoming beta22 and a friend mentioned that the sound card dosen't have a proper "line out" to run to the b22. Thoughts?

I've got a netbook running XP with redbook FLAC files played by Foobar, that I hooked up to the miniDAC via USB, so I should just set the Apogee USB ASIO driver to 44.1/16 bit, right? Any reason to set it at 24 bit? (Still waiting for my PICO to arrive, but I dusted off the miniDAC to try with the netbook. I've been using the 840C primarily, and I'd forgotten how good the miniDAC sounds!)

What good/excellent sources are there with usb and toslink inputs that have an inbuilt preamp or have consumer (-10dBu) rather than line-level (+4dBu) analog XLR outputs ? It`d need to have usb and toslink inputs at a bare minimum, i2s would help future proof it . I am looking for a quieter source than my line-level mini-dac so that I can remove the voltage divider I`m having to use to reduce its volume. A source with as good or better performance than the mini-dac is preffered. my current solution http://www.head-case.org/forums/do-yourself/5997-resistor-type-make-volume-attenuation.html#post218512

http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=Oppo_Units&Category_Code=MODS&Product_Count=37 Anyone heard one of these? Any thoughts? The price of the mods is crazy high for such an inexpensive player. I own a stock Oppo 970HD which I use as an upsampling DVD player. I am very pleased with it. Deadwood looks fantastic! I've used it to play music, but only through my HT setup, which isn't as resolving as my headphone rig, so I can't really judge its sound quality. Anywho, I've been considering hooking up my Oppo to my headphone rig just to do a shootout between it, the Modwright, and the Aqvox. Maybe I'll do it this we…

I am thinking about upgrading one of my E5's. I like the sacdmods zap filter/ LC audio clock combination but I was curious about RAM. First, has anyone had any experience with this company in general; good or bad. Secondly, they do a transformer type modification to the output stage of the E5. Since they claim they remove all the transistors, op amps etc.. what drives the trasformers? Are they driven directly from the dac chip itself? Has anyone eve heard a RAM player with this output transformer type output stage? I am definitely intrigued by this clearly different approach. www.referanceaudiomods.com ..... just click the E5 link and you can read all about the $75…

Friend is looking to setup a cheap audio/video system and looking to spend $600-750 on a receiver. Anyone have a suggestion in this price range? He's leaning towards a couple Denon and Yamaha models, neither of which he or I has any experience with. Any help would be much appreciated. Thought of the Outlaw RR2150, but he wants HDMI if possible.

So I'm tinkering with the notion of dumping the 999es in favor of a player which also handles DVD-A and HDCD. HDCD capability is important since all of the new Grateful Dead Rhino releases are HDCD encoded, and I love the Grateful Dead. The most immediately obvious choice is a modded Denon 3910, since it is widely positively reviewed, and modded models can be had cheap on the gon. As we speak there is an sacdmods for 1300 and a modwright for 2300. I tend toward the Modwright since I'm already a fan of the Modwright house sound, and since it has that big ass overbuilt power supply (which, if I bought used, I would send in to get the tube rectification upgrade). I'm look…

Ars Technica just published a salutary article on studio efforts to improve the sound quality of iTunes and other digital tracks. http://arstechnica.c...he-ipod-age.ars I'm glad there's good news about digital, for once. There are still many technical limitations, e.g., the iPhone still has much less storage space at 64GB than the iPod Classic at 160GB. Each portable can only hold a small slice of a decent music library encoded at low compression or in lossless format – never mind high-resolution files. There's also the tradeoff between battery life, device size and price. The HiFiMAN HM-602, for example, only has 8GB. You're really sacrificing capacity for qu…

As promised. Naykid pictures. Actually, this is one big nice sized board, very well populated. You look inside some CDP's and find a very tiny unpopulated board, in a very thin walled flimsy case. The Apollo's case is thick cast Alum., and built like a tank.

I am thinking of getting a Rega Apollo R as a transport for my headphone rig (transport -> PS Audio PWD MKII -> BHSE). I need something that is a half rack size and this seems to be pretty nice. I like that it loads from the top too. Anyone know any reason to not get it? The other option would be a CD player that would be used as a transport and dac (instead of the PWD). This could be full size. It would need to have optical in so that I could play music from my Apple Express.

I'm a newb when it comes to CD players and I was wondering what is the differences between the 2? I was going to use it connected to my DAC1 to play CDs instead of playing my CDs from my laptop. Right now my laptop with HD-DVD player is okay, but I'm worried about how much jitter it may be producing. I was hoping to get a decent CD player to play regular CDs. I was thinking about sticking with my DAC1 and just using my laptop CD player since the DAC1 should help cutdown on the jitter, but I'm not sure. Thanks in advance .

I see, on the Rega web site, that they have just released the Saturn. And you can read the details there.

Slot-loading compact disc drive Asynch USB up to 96 kHz / 24-bit Ethernet link for iTunes and UPnP libraries S/PDIF inputs (AES/EBU, RCA, Toslink) iPhone/iPod Touch remote control XLR and RCA outputs, fixed or variable. Drool. Sounds like it's going to be expensive though. $6K or so.

Sony 9100ES and Denon 3910 mods. Disclaimer: To start with, I am NO WAY affiliated with APL, HRAM, or SACDmods, All mods done were at full retail price. Sorry about the ?fan boyishness toward some modding retailers. It is all there to see you get the biggest bang for the buck and not get burned. About the owner: I have and can mod my own equipment to some degree as well as build my own equipment as I have done so to many ?Amateur Ham Radio? pieces over the years as well as licensed to do so. However at age 56 my hand is shaky and the expensive items are left to the ?so called pros?. The ?so called pros? we will attempt to ferret out for you here in limited quantit…