Home Source Components

I sold a Valab NOS DAC I had in preparation for the $320 Chameleon NOS DAC group buy. I loved the Valab, and it delivered on what I wanted it to (musicality and vocals), and I assumed the Chameleon would only better that. However, I read through the NOS DAC bashing thread with Dan Lavry, and now I'm wondering if my love for the Valab is only because I haven't heard any other half decent DACs. What's yall's opinions on NOS DACs as a whole? Would you advise getting the Chameleon, ever? The only other DAC I've read of that has the traits I desire (warmth, musicality, etc; basically analog sound) is the DAC19MKIII, which is unavailable until later this month and costs…

I swear to God I won't buy anything else if I can afford this http://www.bladelius.com/products/bladelius/media-players/embla.html Never heard of this brand. Anyone has?

Well it's finally arrived after sitting at APL since December waiting for the 32bit upgrade. I'm not terribly bothered though as it arrived in one piece, the whole 20kgs. The unit is still warming up but first impressions are very positive though the whole system is stone cold so I might have a better idea tonight. Right now I'm listening to the SACD Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms and it is flat out stunning. The sound is just like it's from a great electrostatic, hanging in space and inviting you to take a listen. The first thing I did was to rip it open to inspect any shipping damage so I'll leave you with some internal porn... …

My babies transport has died today, was working earlier but now she just makes a clicking noise.. She has had her use over the years sometimes playing 10 hour days sometimes even 24 strait for burn in... i called Meridian and they are sending me an email on what to do next, expected turn around is about three weeks from start to finish. no clue on repair cost as the machine is way out of warranty. been offered $5000 on a used 808 yesterday also, but i don't have the time nor use for such a player now. i just hope the repair cost don't hurt me... please pour a bit of coffee out today for my fallen homie!

The story starts here: http://www.head-case.org/forums/home-source-components/5712-vintage-dac-sonic-frontiers-sfd-2-a.html So to summarize the story: last week I bought a vintage Sonic Frontiers DAC and I come home and the right channel is completely distorted. Although it managed to work for a few hours (giving me a taste of its magic), afterwards the distortion came back and never left . So I take it to a repair shop and the person confirms it is the right DAC is at fault. Yes, the one with the bizarre foil on it . So I've been had. The D20400A chip is probably quite hard to find these days and probably obsolete as well so a solution occurred to me which …

I tried to take every detail. I still have some photos if someone need more details. Overall sound is good. This dac runs warm. Quiet curious about the buffer design. comments plz @kevin gilmore

This is the stock layout, not columns ur or any third party! So clean and white and minimalisticly Scandinavian! Its got a freaking spectrum analyzer! No more firing up audition to check out the graphs... The graph on the pic- first half is 192 cbr mp3, then i switched to a flac, you can clearly see the ownage.

So I have been running Roon as my go to audio software for listening to my digital library and integrating it with Tidal and Qobuz. The software works very well and they have kept upgrades. I have been using a 2018 Mac mini to run my Roon server and it has worked very well though not without a few hiccups in keeping it running on a continuous basis. A picture of that setup is below. It consisted of the mac mini and a 10 TB USB disk to hold my library and Roon backups, a 27” monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse. The previous generation of Roon nucleus appliances were quite pricey compared to the Mac mini so I never really considered buying one. However when they…

Help. So it's looking like I need another source. This is equally caused by a room change and stupidly selling the 13 Parasounds I owned recently. I strangely work for company that gives one-off bonuses with gift certificates. Although the list of certs is vast (if only I was looking for a iron skillet, maternity dress or rifle), for audio it comes down to Amazon.com. This is a secondary source so if possible it would be great if I could find an Amazonian solution here. That would probably mean one of these. I always have a Pico DAC to fall back to, but the Parasounds (and Lavry) show I can stretch further. There are some Benchmarks, a PS Audio and some Musical Infideliti…

Recently changed over my rig a little (including moving to a 16-bit DAC and thus back to an Airport Express) and when listening to several quietish opera tracks over the weekend I noticed many pops not there before. Originally thought something may have happened to the file, but narrowed it down to the APX. Have play files through Squeezebox Touch (fine), two Airport Expresses (not fine), on multiple outlets (not fine), under various power conditioning (not fine), with two DACs (not fine), wireless or wired (not fine), AirPlay from main computer or iPad (not fine) and a ton of tracks since (not fine). Firmware on both shows 7.5.2, which is current. Anyone else have proble…

Weiss has released a new DAC202 with new D/A not based on the Minerva and integrated headphone amp. $6440 list price.

Possibly. Stereophile: Channel D Pure Vinyl

Denon's DVD-A1UD: world's first universal (SACD / DVD-A) Blu-ray player - Engadget SACD, DVD-A and Blu-ray player... for the small sum of $6k

I picked up a Parasound 1100 hd at a thrift shop and found this website searching for info about it, I guess I should have opened it because the manual on the Parasound website is wrong. According to the manual it has 2 PCM63's per channel operating a push-pull output stage. I saw it didn't have balanced outputs but figured the manual was correct. Well it only has a single PCM63K per channel. It has an old high speed video opamp for the current conversion to voltage. I had bought it on the spot vagely remembering an Absolute sound article where they liked it as much as the TOL parasound and as much as any DAC at the time and I have always liked my friends Pass D…

I have been playing with idea of hooking up my netbook to my main system to play some FLAC files and WAV CD Rips that I got floating around. Most of them are HQ LP and CD rips of stuff that I can't find in any other format and that are rare as hens teeth. Burning them to CD is a nuance and I want to just play them using Foobar2000 feeding my DAC or just straight into a preamp. Not sure which way to go or what device to use. Do any of you use something like this? Have any suggestions?

I'd like to get a dac to pair with my recently acquired O2/KGSS rig. I'm currently using my APL modded Philips SACD1000 but there's a pretty big portion of music that I only have on hard drives. I'd like to keep this as inexpensive as possible but if I can't find anything to my liking I'm willing to wait it out awhile. I'll mostly likely be using the DAC with a Squeezebox as the transport.

Just thinking of grasping this but there're little reviews out there. I wonder how does it stand against other commercial DACs like the DAC1,DA10 and DA220MKII? And, most importantly, can it be configured to have USB input?

Does anyone here have the USB Off Ramp Turbo 2? I know of only one person on Headfi that has one and he said it was an improvement over an Audiophile USB as transport to his DA10. I'm a bit skeptical and Empirical Audio makes no mention of a money back guarantee. Their engineer posts a lot on Headfi and AudioAsylum. Website: http://www.empiricalaudio.com/

Smoking deal http://cls.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?homevdeo&1192926190

Hi Guys, Just venturing into sacd and have the option of buying either of the above. Not into video side just Audio. All comments appreciated. Budget limited at present. The s2000 came out in 2007 and the age worries me. Valid or not?. Technology changes rapidly these days. Thanks Les

Interesting. Halide Design Bridge Review | Computer Audiophile Thoughts?

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…

As promised here are some pics of the first reference level CDP Sony ever made, well one half of it. Released in 1987 it's built to a standard Sony can only dream off today with solid copper panels and huge transformers for it's meager 25w draw.

My latest signal path has started with Roon, which is a piece of software I really enjoy. It sounded excellent, but recently I found that I could fuck with it a little more and spend time twiddling knobs, and I'm powerless to resist that. Most notably, Roon makes it simple to delegate all the actual "file playing" duties to another program, HQPlayer. Roon and HQPlayer represent significantly different approaches to music playback and management. Roon focuses on metadata, art, liner notes, reviews: basically the kind of edifying stuff you read and think about while listening to music. HQPlayer focuses on filters, and by Jesus are there ever a lot of them. And…

The EAR Acute CDP Or, how does one decribe the goodness of an Ansel Adams photograph? Is it the technical mastery? Ansel Adams was afterall a master with his darkroom work and the technical aspects of his pictures, the exposure, contrast, detail, sharpness, tone, and so forth are outstanding and beyond reproach. But there's a lot more to his photos than that, the composition and how he captures a scene, the artistic aspect combined with the technical mastery is what makes them truly great. There's a lot of things which can't be described with words, but if you see the photos you instantly know that it's something special. And that's the problem I have when try…