New Kid on the Block: Resonessence Invicta

Although it looks very interesting the MSRP of almost $4,000 will mean that most of us will not have an opportunity to own.

If you order one, you only stand to lose $500.  Just imagine, each one of these lovely units is made by hand, so you'll need to wait 4-8 weeks before you can even be sure you'll never get your $500 back.  How sad.

Interesting box, but you can get the same functionality for much less - and with great specs.

Also, the "future upgrade" ports seem to be a vendor lock-in. Assuming the company survives, you'll be expected to throw a few more big ones at it because it will sound "awful" if you don't spend another $2,000 on some magic box.

Ooh, a Canadian maker. Not too many of those...

I've been talking with Mark Mallinson, president of Resonessence Labs, about possibly getting a demo unit of the Invicta to check out. I'll update here if I get further details. From what I can tell they are very straight forward, no talk of magic box upgrades or anything....

I hope they agree to it. 

 

The requisite 6moons review is out.

 

That's one heck of interesting DAC. Almost twice the budget I want to spend for a new DAC...
Not sure if it's true, but this is funny:

That was a review? All they did was talk about the specs and features, sort of.

 

I wonder how the headphone outputs on this thing perform. They have 30Ω output, which I find a bit odd. Perhaps they only intend for it to be used with the 300Ω and up crowd? (well I guess the 250Ω Beyers can play too)

Well, it's confirmed that I'll be getting one of these to try out. Should ship sometime this week and I get to keep it for 3 weeks. That's a little tight for time but I'll take what I can get. Mine will be a pre-production model so it won't have a few functions like remote, but the core functionality will be intact.
 

I assume that is in reference to the built in playback function using SD cards. It only plays WAV and AIFF files.
 

 

I won't read their "review" until I'm done with mine, but that seems to be the way they do things sometimes. For all their faults, I appreciate the fact that Srajan has a bunch of high end headphones. It cracks me up when a reviewer only has an SR60 or something to test the headphone jack on a piece of high end equipment.

 

I didn't know about the output impedance - is that from the manual? I'll give it a good test with some lower ohm headphones to see how it reacts.

 

We'll look forward to the review. I got the output impedance number from the 6moons review, although I imagine it's in the manual as well. I'll refrain from any other comments though, so I don't "taint" any impressions before the product arrives.

Received my Invicta yesterday. Here are some terrible pictures, taken by my phone in bad lighting. Sorry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initial impressions: This thing is smaller than I had thought. Kind of deep but not very wide, and it sits low. My big hands will have to adjust to the controls. But it has the appropriate build quality that one would expect at this price.

 

As for sound: Very, very good. I can already tell that this is at least on the same level as some of the best DACs I've heard. I can also tell that it will require lots of listening to figure out exactly how it compares to my other DACs, much like the audio GD Reference 7 did. The headphone amp section is dynamite, very clean and powerful. 

 

I've only got it for 3 weeks, so I really need to focus my listening during that time frame.

Ooh, we eagerly await your review.

>As you know that chip is now regarded as the world's best audio DAC and has been designed into the most high-end digital audio systems

lol...um, regarded by? 'self-proclaimed'?

Probably more accurate to say "regarded by some", I think that would be reasonable.