Hmm, reading through myself over the last few weeks' content, I'm a little bit confused and disappointed. I was thinking that the newer, and more expensive products of Audio-gd are free from the native DSD noise problem.
As far as I remember, gLer, and other R28 owners mentioned, the R28 is free of the R2R-11 dsd problem.
The R1 should be almost the same as the R28 on the DAC part. So what is the truth?
I've the original R2R-11, with firmware upgrade. Does the background native DSD noise of the new R1 differs from the R2R-11? If so, is it less, or different?
I really would like to stay by R2R ladder DACs and especially Audio-gd products, but native DSD is important to me, and I don't want to spend almost 1000 Euro for another flawed product.
Are there any other DAC options from reliable sources around Eur 800-1200, which can cover my needs (good, revealing, but analogue-like sound signature, R2R, problem free DSD playback)?
The new Holo Spring II is tempting, but I can't justify to hand out Eur 2000 for a DAC.[/QUOTE
The sad truth is R-7, R-1 all have some DSD issues even if much less than R-11. The latter is now upgraded by putting in hardware digital filter and should be similar
To the later models for DSD. Mainly DSD 256 is affected. U can hear it mainly with headphones, not so easily with speakers, mainly ar beginning or end of track. HQplayer resampling will reduce the noise to barely audible. I think
Stefano found a nice filter setting from HQplayer for it. Kingwa is supposedly working to solve this issue. I am not sure R-28 would be free of this plague. But u can ask him if all thr R2R DACs have this issue.
I am not aware of any cheap DAC under US $1000 with R2R that also does DSD. Basically 2 DAC in 1, hard to lower the price.