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New DAC of interest...


Pars

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John Westlake (formerly of Cambridge and Pink Triangle IIRC, though I am not sure of all of his history) posted a link to a DAC that he designed recently using the ESS Sabre DAC as the basis:

Signal Path International - Era Speakers & Peachtree Audio - Introducing Nova

Reference thread on diyaudio:

diyAudio Forums - Da-capo issue (John W?) - Page 16

Might be a good option for those interested in the Sabre but not up to building your own. EDIT: John Westlake seems to know his shit from all I have seen from him on a couple of forums so I would think anything he is involved in would be worth a listen. I have not heard this DAC (and wouldn't be the one to judge it anyhow since I don't use external DACs), so take it in that light.

Edited by Pars
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But Mike, you've already got a Sabre based DAC, you just don't know (haven't broken your '09 rule) about it yet...

Cool. I can't wait to get it. :)

I'm buying gear like crazy. I need to stock up. I'm just going to leave a bunch of stuff in the boxes and ship to myself every so often during '09.

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I had a demo Decco (try and say that fast) for a bit and it was decent. This was before headphones for me, so I can't comment on that section. With a better DAC and bigger amp, the Nova looks very nice.

Apropos of nothing, I also liked the Era monitors a lot despite all the "style-of-life" ad crap on their Web site. They sound like Aerials, which is a good thing in my book.

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That piqued my interest as well, but I'm wondering if he's optimizing the analog stage for them individually? Curse my curiosity with DHTs :-\

Depends what you mean optimized. To my understanding (reading what is on that page+some information posted by Gordon Rankin on diyhifi), he is using the Sabre in voltage out mode, with the mentioned Magnequest transformer converting that to SE, and then I assume following that with the DHTs, taking the output from the plate. No telling what kind of ratio the transformers have. Of course, this is mostly just assumptions on my part, so any/all of it could be wrong.

Oh, before I forget: Dew Eet!

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