I’ve come across some people who thought it was fantastic. I suppose it’s a personal preference. A Chord Dave connected to a laptop using Audirvana sounds considerably better than a Bartok. Granted there’s around $6000 worth of power cords and power conditioning equipment involved but that Bartok wasn’t plugged straight into the wall either. Their choice of power cables was weird but that’s another story. Were you listening to it through headphones or speakers? I wasn’t really impressed with its performance when using its headphone amp. It’s plenty loud but not exciting for me. There could have been some issue with that demo unit. Playing one song from Slimane seemed to keep crashing the control app. The control app itself was bare bones and somewhat outdated.
Lovely! I would recommend @dCS James to ignore the detractors and understand that you do have a large group of people who are interested to learn your approach!
They talk about, as technology is similar and they are more successful in ADC area where some filtering is important. /copy-pasted stuff/We get digital out of analog via ADC’s, obviously, and in fact the first post speaks to that quite a bit, so it’s totally relevant.
What headphones did you use with the Bartok? I demoed one once with a HD800s, HD820, Sundara, Arya and DCAAeon2c. Only on the Sennheiser i could have described it as boring. On the planar headphones is was like it brought out there best properties. String instruments on the Arya where like really lifelike. Bass guitar on the DCA2 was special.
Yes, most people here would know the general samling stuff. The interesting info would be the ring dac fpga implementation (i guess it kind of like this: https://slideplayer.com/slide/11070516/) and filtering stuff in detail.
Believe it or not but I used Meze Empyrean. Sad but true. What bewildered me is that John Darko made a long review film on his website using both with seemingly stellar results. Either the unit that I was demoing was defective or it’s a matter of personal preference. With that performance I just couldn’t justify paying that kind of money. I likely wouldn’t have paid $5000 if they offered. Curiously, Chord Dave paired with a Linn Selekt DSM with an upgraded Katalyst dac sounds significantly better than Bartok but at a roughly similar price.
Have not heard the Empy on a Bartok but i guy i know decribed its sound as horny on a Bartok. (his words not mine
but i guess that definetly does not qualify as boring)
I had the opposite experience with the Dave and Bartok. I used to own the Abyss TC with the formula s and powerman and the bartok was better to my ears than the dave. It was with speakers that the difference was even bigger the Dave presented a smaller sound stage the Bartok presented bigger and with much more realistic imaging as well. I have since moved on to even better speakers and have sold my Abyss to fund the speaker and amp upgrades. Next might be the Rossini or an MSB Premire.
Yepe! FPGA is the real deal. Where would MSB and Rockna be rated in comparison?
The descriptions that some people give about sound signature are at times truly hilariousHave not heard the Empy on a Bartok but i guy i know decribed its sound as horny on a Bartok. (his words not mine
That makes me believe there was somthing really wrong with the setup you auditioned. Then again every ones ears are different so maybe it's just not your thing.
. Concerning the Bartok, I spent about an hour trying various albums. I tried its crossfeed, which I didn’t particularly like either. Either there was something wrong with it or I wasn’t into it’s presentation.It could be either a case of a defective/malfunctioning Bartok or personal preferences. I’m open to revisiting it again. At least to my ears, the soundstage on the Dave is quite large. I mainly use it as a headphone amp so its performance with speakers isn’t an issue. Even if it were, Linn Selekt DSM with the Katalyst dac performs quite well in that regard, especially when it’s space optimization function is activated. I went to several events where it was demoed with many high end speakers and the results were quite pleasing every time.
