[Utopia]

Audio GD has presented a couple of new products today, I think, the Compass 384 and NFB 3 (384), with the PCM5102 DAC chip. Does anyone know any other products that use this chip? How does it compare to Wolfson or Sabre DACs?

 

[EraserXIV]

Interesting, I'm sure if you e-mail him he'll let you know. In my experience with Kingwa, he's been very honest and upfront about his products.

 

[khaine1711]

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Audio GD has presented a couple of new products today, I think, the Compass 384 and NFB 3 (384), with the PCM5102 DAC chip. Does anyone know any other products that use this chip? How does it compare to Wolfson or Sabre DACs?

JKDAC32 and the new Ciunas. Also many of Meridian digital line (the most current one being the explorer). Arcam did a really good dac (rPac) with XMOS + PCM5012 too. Generally chip doesn't mean squat. The Meridian Explorer and the JKdac32 for example, have little to nothing similar the sonic department.
 
The main advantage of PCM5102 is that it accepts 32bit/384khz signal, while Wolfson 8741 can only accept up to 24/192. Sabre (ess9018) can also accept 32/384, but is expensive to implement well. To add something technical, the 5012 is a voltage output dac, so it doesn't need an i/v stage, and thus can save some cost too (and invest that in something else).
 
I could imagine how it will sound, but I'll refrain from speculating on gears that I haven't heard. 

 

[KamijoIsMyHero]

Cool deal as promo, the description is seems to be just a copy and paste of the Compass 2 though lol

 

[tim3320070]

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Cool deal as promo, the description is seems to be just a copy and paste of the Compass 2 though lol

Well sure, why would he reinvent the wheel on this based on a chip?

 

[KamijoIsMyHero]

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Well sure, why would he reinvent the wheel on this based on a chip?

Well, I expected better description on why he remade it with a PCM, such as a reason of coming up with this new product, and to give a better differentiation between this new thing and the compass 2(PCM vs Sabre?). I don't think I mentioned "reinvent" nor implied it in my post.

 

[EraserXIV]

You can probably email him to see what kind of character it has compared to the others. I think one of the main reasons he came out with it is because it's much easier to get 32/384 to work on it.

 

[cloverp]

very interesting, i wonder how it stack up against the wm based nfb and does this dac upsample all signals to 384?