New Dac Styleaudio Carat Sapphire

looks good, how much?

Anybody bought this DAC? I really like to know how it sounds. 

My initial thought was to plug before my tube-amp to my hd-650. I have seen comments on the carat-topaz, saying the sound was not so good directly out of the topaz with hd-650, anybody has some experience on this?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ouaiba 

Anybody bought this DAC? I really like to know how it sounds. 

My initial thought was to plug before my tube-amp to my hd-650. I have seen comments on the carat-topaz, saying the sound was not so good directly out of the topaz with hd-650, anybody has some experience on this?

I use this DAC since three months now and I am very happy with the sound. I have compared the Sapphire with the DacMagic and a more expensive Hegel dac and was impressed by the full and airy sound of this little box. I use it with the Squeezebox and have a sound comparable with my $ 3000 SACD player.

Truly recommendable!
 

I'm a bit late to this thread, but I recently purchased the Styleaudio Carat-Sapphire to supplement my Audio-GD DAC and now that it has burned-in, I have been extremely impressed with the results. I use this in combination with a Kingrex UC-192 USB-SPDIF converter with Kingrex UPower battery supply, and feed it mostly hires flac audio files, played with Fidelia on OSX. The Styleaudio & Kingrex combination is both very liquid and precise, and is so much more enticing than the Carat-Sapphire on it's own.

All who have heard this setup are impressed - so much so that I'm confident in how it will do against an Ayre QB-9 in an upcoming comparison.

Unfortunately the owner of the Ayre QB-9 was a no-show at our recent listening test, but a new NAD M51 DAC, along with a CEntrance DACmini CX were there. I brought my Styleaudio and Audio-GD DAC's, along with the Kingrex UC-192 reclocker to be used with both. We played all the gear through a beautiful set of Rowen PR2/PA2 pre-amp, power-amp combination, outputing to a set of Rowen P1.4 loudspeakers.

Airy and easy sound (sound that you could listen to all day) from all the DAC's here except the CEntrance DACmini, which was dry and analytical in the treble in this company. The new NAD was similar in smoothness to my DAC's, although it did get loose on some very deep bass sections as compared to the Styleaudio and Audio-GD. Apparantly the drivers for the NAD M51 are still being properly finalized, so this may improve in the future.