Audio-gd Reference 1 DAC (56 K warning) - Page 12

Given that Currawong was the person who initially approached Kingwa with the idea of designing the Compass, and helped in designing, it is not really surprising that he would have a lot of posts on the subject. In fact, given that Currawong's Compass thread has almost 5000 posts, 163 posts seems seems surprisingly low. All IMHO, of course.

Voltron: Fair enough, but I deleted my rant within a couple of minutes of posting it (and considerably before you posted a reply), as it was idiotic and written in anger, so please consider it retracted. Yes, I have a lot of posts...about the products I have owned, used or tried. You might try the same search for "Stax", (112 posts), Denon (95 posts), Lavry (60 posts), Northstar (58 posts), Macbook (58 posts), K701 (58 posts). Those wouldn't count threads that mention them where I've posted on them without those keywords coming up in the post.

sandchak: Shilling isn't tolerated in China either from what I can gather.

All of the first 18 testers did pay in full, there was no bribery involved in making us post about audio-gd whatsoever. If you do a search for me and compass you'll see I have never advertised/recommended/praised it outside of the audio-gd product threads. I have only mentioned it every now and then in other threads to let people know what gear I used to test equipment with. I have seen some people excessively promote the compass outside the compass thread which I disapprove of, but they're just a couple of people and it's not fair to generalize all compass owners that way.

If you're suspicious about a discount because of the few posts in the compass thread talking about a mysterious thing Kingwa offered to the prototype users, it was not a discount in the compass, it was just an offer to remedy the fact that we were getting prototypes rather than the final compass. And it has no bearing on how the first 18 users would've posted on the compass' performance itself. But please don't ask us what the offer was because we were asked not to, but it's a fair and just offer to make us for having prototypes and we would mention it if we could.

In fact I haven't heard any of the initial testers seriously bemoan about the fact that they don't have preamp out, the lower 9dB gain setting, bright setting, or new faceplates. Most likely because of how grateful we are to own such a great device.

The DSP-1 must certainly be doing a lot of things really right. Because, even though I feed my Reference One with a rather lowly transport that can't possibly be "jitter-free", the sound quality that I get from the Reference One excels in things I know to be extremely jitter-sensitive, such as painting a convincing acoustic and reproducing complex higher harmonics.

Could anyone compare a Ref1 using a cd transport as source to a usb to spdif converter as source? Particularly could you listen for whether either source gives longer or shorter decay when playing through the Ref1? Do notes sound crisper on one versus the other? Thanks.

Ive just followed the recent rapartie on this thread addressing concerns over potential conflicts of interest when members review gear.

I think this a a fair debate but would like to request that considering the delicate nature of such a topic, that the language used is rather more respectful of each other on all sides.

Im very appreciative of those who have posted their finding on this forum. As a beginner in this field it can be very confusing trying to work out what gear to buy. As well the rarity of the gear means that I for one, cant audition it before buying. I find professional reviews are often scant and sometimes of questionable objectivity. That leaves me with forums like this that I find very useful. Being able to get multiple opinions form different users with different musical tastes, different systems and different power grids might be the most trustworthy data base possible.

I think its therefore important to encourage more members to post. Some members are upfront about there involvement with a company - one thread started with the reviewer stating he had requested a review model to trial and after it was sent back. Perhaps if members routinely declared their interests in the company e.g. review model on loan, purchased with no mention of doing a review, full cost purchase etc it would help with the transparency of the process.

Please keep those reviews coming.

The DAC seems to use an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. Anyone have details on this?

Only what Google revealed to me, which was the product page. Seems to be a programmable digital signal processor.

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It's definitely an fpga that can be used as part of a dsp. I have used this fpga quite a bit myself. I'm justing wondering what type of dsp is being implemented in this dac.
Maybe it is being used to control the dac settings? I'd be surprised that a high end dac would use dsp.

You have seen this I suppose. It gives at least some idea of what the DSP does. Although admittedly I think a more elaborate manual is called for.