Head-Fi.org › Forums › Equipment Forums › Dedicated Source Components › What to look for in a DAC?
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

What to look for in a DAC?

post #1 of 6
9/16/10 at 4:49pm
Thread Starter 

I am considering looking for a DAC and was wondering what to look for.  Should I be looking for a specific chip set?  Any other design features?  There are many kits, boards and other China made devices on Ebay and I have built my own amps from schematics/circuit boards etc and don't have a problem installing a board in a box with all the connections.  Is it worth purchasing some of these low cost boards/DAC's?  Some adds boast certain chips as "best in the world etc."

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Cheers,  Dub

 

Reply
post #2 of 6
9/16/10 at 8:34pm
Thread Starter 

Thanks

Reply
post #3 of 6
9/16/10 at 9:07pm

FWIW, stop by a thread I have going.  There's a lot of BS in the beginning to wade through but towards the end, it becomes much more informative.

 

Hope the thread suggestion is found helpful.

 

Reply
post #4 of 6
9/16/10 at 9:16pm

AFAIK PCM1704UK and ES9018 Sabre are the top most often preferred chipsets.

 

PCM1704UK DACs are most prevalent with Audio GD's stuff, which is quite literally the BMW of Head-Fi world right now...

 

ES9018 Sabre is the other "top" chipset.  Don't really know what to tell you to look for in a ES9018 DAC; they all seem to be very high end already.  Audio-GD's made a 9018 DAC recently as well.

Reply
post #5 of 6
9/17/10 at 7:48am
Thread Starter 

I really appreciate the help.  The information out there is confusion and often contradictory.  Cheers,  Doug

Reply
post #6 of 6
9/17/10 at 8:00am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dubwicht View Post

I am considering looking for a DAC and was wondering what to look for.  Should I be looking for a specific chip set?  Any other design features?  There are many kits, boards and other China made devices on Ebay and I have built my own amps from schematics/circuit boards etc and don't have a problem installing a board in a box with all the connections.  Is it worth purchasing some of these low cost boards/DAC's?  Some adds boast certain chips as "best in the world etc."

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Cheers,  Dub

 

 

Some of the things you might want to check on a DAC:

 

- Power supply: tranformer, capacitors, regulators, pcb layout

- DAC chip: R2R chips such as the pcm1704 are the best, but recent sigma-delta chips such as the WM8741, AK4399, ES9018 are better than previous generations

- Output stage: opamp based, discrete based... It really depends on the designer and there is no good or bad answers

- Digital receiver: the lower the jitter number the better usually, DIR9001 or WM8804 are good digital receiviers

 

... and most importantly, the overall implementation.

 

I wrote 2 DAC reviews recently where I explain the choices made for each unit:

http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/483899/review-of-the-audio-gd-dac-19-dsp-c2-amp-the-acss-connection

http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/476557/review-of-the-purepiper-dac-a-1-an-excellent-24-96-budget-dac

 

While that was targeted for those specific units, you can probably see what you should look for when buying a new DAC.

Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: Dedicated Source Components
Head-Fi.org › Forums › Equipment Forums › Dedicated Source Components › What to look for in a DAC?