[alphaman]

My designs are about making the performance as accurate and transparent as possible to the original performance as I hear it. If others do not perceive as I do then so be it, I am not bothered. Thankfully there are very many people who agree with me and are prepared to spend their own money on it - something that I am grateful for, which is why I spend so much time on these threads.

Another aspect is that often thousands of specific and detailed listening tests are involved, that is simply not possible with a panel.

And I am not a testee for Chord - I am entirely independent and own all of the IP that goes into my designs.

Mr Watts:
I think I can promote your products better than, forgive my bluntness, you can.
One name: John Atkinson.
He has a well-equipped and STANDARDIZED lab and has listened to / lab-tested 100s of DACs ... with over hundreds of man-hours .... and he had strong praise for Chord ... except for the DAC in the early 2000s that had some peculiar noise measurements. And all these objective/subjective metrics and opinions have been committed to the web site or the physical Stereophile magazine.

 

[chesebert]

Mr Watts:
I think I can promote your products better than, forgive my bluntness, you can.
One name: John Atkinson.
He has a well-equipped and STANDARDIZED lab and has listened to / lab-tested 100s of DACs ... with over hundreds of man-hours .... and he had strong praise for Chord ... except for the DAC in the early 2000s that had some peculiar noise measurements. And all these objective/subjective metrics and opinions have been committed to the web site or the physical Stereophile magazine.

JA has already tested Dave.

 

[Somatic]

I'm away from Headfi for a while and the bomb has exploded. I still find the Dave + Farad3 to sound great. I can't chase the absolute best anyways. Oh well ...

 

[Arnold Schwartz]

If you enjoy it (and it is a very good DAC) then why would certain measurements not being what someone says they should be bother you? Would it suddenly sound worse?

My Dave sounds just as good today as it did before that review and I am just as comfortable with the price as I was before.

It matters because:

1) We are not immune from bias.
2) The expert engineering (a major input in cost?) should be measurable.
3) The price should be commensurate with the sound quality, service and product finishing.
4) Manufacturers conveniently use measurements to claim superior product performance over competitors but are quick to downplay the importance when it no longer suits them. Did someone once make claims about audible something or other down to -300db?

We should have it all when we buy expensive luxury goods. If you go down to the dragstrip there’s lots of 8 second quarter-mile jalopy’s - they might be fast but don’t compare them to Ferrari. So to me it matters how you get there.

 

[andrewd01]

My measurements for the DAVE largely align with Amir's. Some small differences but to be expected when testing different units in different places etc etc.

I don't however agree with his conclusion, for several reasons.

Firstly: SINAD alone is a seriously poor metric to evaluate the quality of a DAC.
Even for very basic reasons like the fact that if you do not apply at least -3dB of digital headroom to a DAC, it becomes susceptible to intersample over clipping.
Because of this, Chord, RME, Benchmark and various other companies will keep that headroom because it's important to do so. The downside being that you are then sacrificing about 3dB of SINAD.

Compare the Benchmark DAC3B with the Gustard X18 in this test:

Gustard X18:


Clipping to hell and back, lots of unwanted distortion.

Vs DAC3B:



Much better! No clipping at all, cause it has the proper headroom.
And yet if we were to go based only off SINAD the X18 would be the clear winner and there'd be no need to look at any other behaviour.

Additionally in the instance of the DAVE there are things like jitter performance being absolutely amazing, or the reconstruction filter being to my knowledge the best inbuilt option available in any DAC, even many years after its release.

SINAD is a good thing to look at to get a quick indication of if it's going to have some sort of big problem or not, but when looking at dacs over 110dB or whatever, honestly choosing to go based off SINAD alone rather than looking at other areas of performance seems incredibly odd.

There are also other areas of performance such as noise shapers which you actually cannot measure at the output of a device because it's impossible to separate analog noise from quantization noise. You have to simulate it mathematically.

Point is, if you're JUST going off SINAD, then sure, there are other DACs which have a higher number, doesn't mean they're a better DAC and there are lots of areas where the DAVE is still one of if not the highest performing options on the market, and the subjective feedback on it widely speaks for itself

Thanks for your valuable input to the discussion.

That clipping test is interesting. Why was this not flagged in your review of the X18? I saw there was a 1kHz test which did not show the clipping. Can you please provide more information about the test conditions used to make the clipping test? Are these conditions typically experienced when listening to music? It would be interesting to see similar clipping tests on other DACS that rank highly on SINAD tests to confirm the hypothesis that the headroom has been compromised.

 

[dusty.ro]

It matters because:

1) We are not immune from bias.
2) The expert engineering (a major input in cost?) should be measurable.
3) The price should be commensurate with the sound quality, service and product finishing.
4) Manufacturers conveniently use measurements to claim superior product performance over competitors but are quick to downplay the importance when it no longer suits them. Did someone once make claims about audible something or other down to -300db?

We should have it all when we buy expensive luxury goods. If you go down to the dragstrip there’s lots of 8 second quarter-mile jalopy’s - they might be fast but don’t compare them to Ferrari. So to me it matters how you get there.

In regards to 3): if I were to use this logic for other products we woundn't be buying a lot of other stuff. People buy if they find value and that value is subjective. So no, the price doesn't need to reflect sound quality, build quality and so on.

 

[stemiki]

What way should dave be configured in conjunction with mscaler ? Hifi mode on?

HF Fil Off

 

[adrianm]

HPA4 amplifies without adding or removing anything.

That would be 0 feedback,hpa4 is feed forward, so it does add something

 

[AnalogEuphoria]

Amir says the Topping dac measures better than the Dave dac, but how does it sound compared to the Dave? Has anyone heard both? What are your impressions?
Mr. Watts will need to address these results and verify what Amir said was truthful or not.
Amir says you shouldn't hear a difference with different cables, but I definitely do, so I tend to take what he says with a grain of salt, despite the measurements, I let my ears be the judge.

You could try an AB test

 

[chesebert]

.

 

[AnalogEuphoria]

4) Manufacturers conveniently use measurements to claim superior product performance over competitors but are quick to downplay the importance when it no longer suits them. Did someone once make claims about audible something or other down to -300db?

Im a bit confused on "the noise isn't an issue because its inaudible" and "you can hear it down to -300db"

 

[adrianm]

“Feed forward” is likely a marketing term Benchmark is using to confuse people. “0 feedback” is also a marketing term the way they are using it.

You can’t blame brands for coming up with terms for regular consumers.

The tech is actually licensed from thx. It’s not marketing, it’s widely used:
https://research.iaun.ac.ir/pd/honarvar/pdfs/PaperC_6977.pdf

 

[Thenewguy007]

Actually SINAD is worthless as a useful measurement parameter - at least 0 to 60 does give you one important idea for a car. It's more like measuring the length of a vehicle, as a two seat sports car is much better than a long truck, and then ranking cars solely on their length.

The reason why it's useless is that a DAC with a completely fixed noise level of say -100dB (giving SINAD of 100dB) measured in the context of the way it's being used, would give inaudible noise in reality. If this DAC was perfect in every other regard (no distortion etc) and was compared to a DAC at -120dB noise (giving 120 SINAD), and also perfect in every other regard, the listener would not be able to hear any difference whatsoever. But a DAC that had SINAD of 120 dB but with copious amounts of higher order and anharmonic distortion, noise floor modulation and poor reconstruction filters, would sound terrible by comparison to the lowly 100dB SINAD DAC.

Makes sense, in one their threads they reviewed the Topping LA90 & said it was the best amplifier ever with the highest SINAD, but mentioned that if you try to use any headphones with it, you will hear a lot of noise.

 

[chesebert]

The tech is actually licensed from thx. It’s not marketing, it’s widely used:
https://research.iaun.ac.ir/pd/honarvar/pdfs/PaperC_6977.pdf

I found that paper earlier. Thanks.

 

[Arnold Schwartz]

@AnalogEuphoria see post 17,641 in this thread.