Oh, my!... Right out of the box, my DAC19 experience gave me the assurance that this is what I’ve been waiting for all along on the DAC front.
When I moved from the so-called “Max DAC” in my HeadRoom Desktop amp to the DAC in the Grace m902 (both DAC’s feeding the same amps, both head-amps and speaker amps) several years ago, the improvement was very clear. When I moved, a few months ago, from the m902 to the DAC in the Audio-gd NFB-10SE, the improvement was less obvious but still not very subtle. The 10SE is more three-dimensional, with noticeably greater extension too. There’s better microdynamics (resolution of low-level detail) in the sound of the 10SE.
And now, moving from the 10SE to the Audio-gd DAC19, I instantly heard the improvement. No burn-in time at all. I'm talking about
out-of-box experience. But the improvement was there, clear, unmistakable. This last upgrade in SQ – from the NFB-10SE to the DAC19, both feeding the same,
spectacular Master-5 head-amp – is hard to describe. To put it in context, I’d happily live with the 10SE as my only DAC. That would be easy living! To my ears, it’s a great DAC. But the DAC19 is just…more
natural-sounding in a very hard-to-describe sense of the term. I hear the difference, but I’m really at a loss for words to describe it satisfactorily. It’s not obviously more extended in the lows or highs. The soundstage it throws is not obviously more three-dimensional than the 10SE’s. But, somehow, the 10SE sounds just a tad rougher, a tad less lifelike. I’ve seen the adjective “organic” used to describe what I suppose is this very same difference. I’ve also seen the less intelligible word “coherence” used for the same purpose. If such words are any help…
In any case, IME, Kingwa does deliver on the promised upgrade. (In my brief and very recent Audio-gd experience, he’s delivered three times in a big way.) The DAC19/Master-5 combo is, simply put, what I’ve been waiting for in my years as a headphile. (Now, let’s hope it’s also durable.)
Thank you Slim.a for this thread! (And thank you, Tim, for the Audio-gd heads-up!)