PS Audio's new DAC - NuWave - Page 2

For about $8,000 versus $600 I'd hope it's better.

That's the second one I heard about that shipped this week.  Seems we'll be getting some impressions soon.

Mine should arrive tomorrow

mine on Wednesday.

I requested for black, but I don't know which one shipped.  I'll find out tomorrow when it arrives.

Mike

I asked for whatever would be available first and was told Black so Black it is!  IMO the casing doesn't look so pretty in the pictures compared to my PWD, we'll see when it shows up!

NuWave arrived.  It's really long and quite heavy, longer in fact than the amp it's paired with at the moment (Melos Sha-1).  The top appears to be made of acrylic plexiglass; I'm not too keen on that ~ it looks nice but I would have preferred a more durable metal finish.  Acrylic usually scratches if you look at it funny.  The sides are made of plastic like the Perfectwave Dac but the insides and bottom are solid metal.  The shipping packaging that PS Audio uses is top notch as always and the manual very verbose and well written, they even include a standard IEC power cable.

No specs in the manual that I can see unfortunately; supposedly this thing has differential balanced output but I can't be for certain without further investigation.  There are two small push buttons on the front and the standby switch, one button to manually select the source (it has auto select enabled by default) and one to choose Upsampling to 192khz or Native.  The DAC defaults to Native mode.

Plugged in to my Macbook Pro and Audirvana (Older free version) recognized it instantly.  No driver needed for OSX (Windows on the other hand will need a driver).

No sound impressions yet, won't have much time today either!  On first listen it's not blowing me away or anything but I don't mean that in a bad way ~ I am too DAC-ed out at the moment.  A challenge I can already tell is that the Melos Sha-1 seems to have a high gain output and no simple way of lowering it.  I have some 12db RCA attenuators on the way, should help.  Seems Audirvana lets me lower volume in - program, my old DAC didn't allow this, neat!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zoom25 

Would love some pictures, especially the black one, and sound impressions soon! 

 

Based on the pictures on PS Audio's website, it looks like the silver one is the better looking one. 

Mine arrives today.  Will do an unboxing video.

I almost forgot how hard testing DACs can be.  Have been listening a little more this morning and to be quite honest I think I may prefer the tried and true Stello DA100 Signature (connected via plain old USB) to the NuWave.  Something about the Stello sounds more organic ~ true to life to me.  To make sure I wasn't crazy I also have a Pico DAC only added in the mix which seems to lose a little in the detail department compared to the NuWave.  I can't tell you how many times I've listened to the opening of Jazz at the Pawnshop now.  I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.  The difference to me is enjoying the music versus just listening to it.  Slightly disappointing to me considering I really like the PWD.