I heard this new DAC along with its accompanying headphone amp at the T+A room at CES in Las Vegas in January. It was connected to an HD800S. Because I had my HE1000 with me, they let me listen to my HE1000 with it also. Because this was my first time listening to the HD800S, I spent a fair amount of time there, more than I would have otherwise. They did have a good orchestral track available in addition to some standard studio vocal tracks. Prior to coming into this room, I had just spent a fair amount of time at the Chord room listening to the DAVE. I can assure you, this DAC is not in the league of the DAVE, not really even close.
Oversampling to DSD is not new. The Directstream and the Nagra HD both do it. The T+A is closer in presentation to the Directstream, which I know well because I used to own it. The Nagra is in a whole different league. It is smoother and laid back yet more resolving and just more engaging in its presentation compared with the drier presentation of the other two. Neither of these DACs have the holographic abilities of the DAVE, however.
The DAVE oversamples also but well beyond DSD512 and for different reasons than most. Unlike MQA, for example, which oversamples to address the ringing artifacts introduced by the ADC, Rob did not feel this was important. Here was his response to me:
"No I over sample to 2048 FS, or a new filtered sample every 9.6 nS.
The first WTA stage is 16FS. Then the next WTA stage is at 256 FS. Then a three stage filter then takes it to 2048 FS.
Its done for a number of reasons - to reduce the timing of transients uncertainty problem, to enable the noise shapers to work at 104 MHz so that the noise shapers can reproduce depth correctly, and finally to allow no measurable noise floor modulation.
So there are a number of reasons why I oversample to such a high rate.
ADC ringing artifacts is not one of them, as that is irrelevant."
At CanJam the other week, I asked John Franks if they spent much time listening to their competition and his response was "No." Apparently, this is not their practice at all. As ecwl stated, Rob, having been in this business a long time, is intimately familiar with all current DAC technologies (R2R, delta sigma, etc.) and he was incapable of overcoming their inherent limitations (i.e. R2R is too slow to effectively oversample) so he felt he had to design his own DACs from scratch via FPGA to create what he wanted. Now, it is up to the objective listener to decide if he has succeeded.
they are pretty good
