Luvdac
500+ Head-Fier
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- Oct 14, 2013
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Mine wobbles....but who cares! Its a great dac. Just put a blob of blu tack or some folded paper under one foot and you're good to go.
GUSTARD DAC-R26 Balanced Decoder R2R+1Bit Dual Native Decoding Music Bridge
- Thread starter m-i-c-k-e-y
- Start date
Mine wobbles....but who cares! Its a great dac. Just put a blob of blu tack or some folded paper under one foot and you're good to go.
I view this as the strength of R26, giving us a good R2R ladder for PCM and a native DSD decoder for those who wants to use more advanced DSD upsampler. Most DSD DAC Internally upsamples one way or other to deal with the noisy DSD64 format. With R26 we can use whatever we like to upsample and bypass a DAC’s built-in filter which most likely will be inferior.
Native at the expense of 68db SINAD
I’ll have to listen to some upsampled content to see if improvements can be made.
winged creature
100+ Head-Fier
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No wobbly feet or buzzing noise on my unit
Survey for R26 owners. How do you prefer to listen: PCM NOS on or off ? If off, which PCM filter?
cobrabucket
1000+ Head-Fier
NOS off
FAST or MID depending on music
FAST or MID depending on music
Highfive99
100+ Head-Fier
Yes. I keep mine on 24/7. And I had the same reaction with my X26pro. These OCK's are great bang for the buck.Well this place sure has been cookin' today, must be Saturday
I'm chiming in here because I recently posted about my OCK-1 and issues with the R26 reading "ext err". I've discovered when I leave the clock on for 20-30 minutes, the error disappears, and all is well in musicville. And well it is - with the Beatechnik cable in place, (warning: subjective outburst ahead, may not be suitable for the anointed defenders of science) HOLY SCHMIDT. the music just has so much 'in the pocket' groove, the soundstage is beyond big with the R26, it's absolutely immersive! Piano is one of the hardest things to get right IMO, and piano sounded just right tonight. I was enjoying the music like never before, just blown away by the quality of sound. Wow.
I wonder - does anyone here keep the OCK on all the time?
+ 1 / same.
BShaw
500+ Head-Fier
It's astonishing what the OCK is doing. I suppose I can hear it, but the actual experience is that I can FEEL it! I was trying to explain it to my S.O. this afternoon (she's an artist), saying it's like when you see a lithograph where the color plates are off just a wee bit, and you can see everything just fine.....vs everything lining up just perfectly, and the image just hits you. There's added dimensionality, more precise imaging, and a coherence that definitely wasn't at this level before. This is with a good cable and the low pass filter installed. I'm all set with tweaks on this DAC as far as I'm concerned!
That’s fantastic!!
Was this source specific or across the board improvement?
BShaw
500+ Head-Fier
Both streaming and CD, everything just blossomed. I just sit there listening now and mutter 'holy sh88'
I found myself doing this a few times over the last week too, just grinning to myself and saying similar or doing Tom Cruise/Maverick-style double thumbs up / fist-pumps. I know.
Just to test your resolve that you're done with tweaks here's my promised (and advance-apologised slightly OT) update on the LHY SW-8 switch / R26 / OCK-1 combo...
My setup is similar to yours with the OCK-1 & R26 but in lieu of your fibre convertors (which I've not yet tried) I have the SW-8 switch cleaning up the network. System sounds phenomenal now I've had the SW-8 and Athena preamp 2-3 weeks constantly running in the latter especially. All just clicked into place last week. I've found the gear needs to be switched on for at least 4-5 hours, preferably a day or more for it to hit its sweet spot. Some notes I took last week, switching (boom, boom) back and forth from my generic router with stock PS to the SW-8:
- much more expansive soundstage with a greater sense of depth and acoustic space
- treble of guitar strings has a beautiful shimmer and far longer decay
- instruments and vocalists are positioned far more precisely across the sound stage at different depths
- in the Riders on the Storm the thunder is more weighty and rolling, the rain in the background isn't just a homogenous wall of 'rain-like' sound, but has a more subtle ebb and flow, gets you closer (if not quite) to the sound of hearing rain out an open window
- overall great pace, rhythm, timing and energy… enough precision that all the separate elements in a busy soundstage can rise and fall dynamically and in their own spatial location without blurring.
- in Fever, Malia's vocals are more precisely imaged with more palpable and realistic texture. So good.
- HQP DSD512 sounds holographic in this setup. Simply amazing. Yes vocals not as forward as Roon but more nuanced and overall level of resolution vs Roon or even HQP PCM native res or PCM768 is on another level.
The SW-8 is sufficiently good that it dramatically improves even the sound of streamed TV audio so there is genuine soundstage depth and some actual decay, realistic body and texture of sounds whether music, speech or atmospheric sounds in the show. Everything. And this is mere TV, let alone HQP DSD512. Chain is SW-8 > Panasonic TV (native HBO streaming app) > (toslink) > Ifi Purifier S/pdif v2 > R26 coax in (+OCK-1). If you take the SW-8 & Ifi out of the chain then comparatively it sounds exactly as thin, flat and edgy as you'd expect, though the R26/OCK do their best. My below reaction btw in response to Forgisound's question was actually after the previous evening streaming the HBO show The White Lotus. I have never heard AV sound remotely near this good. My newish Denon receiver already collecting dust is totally goneburger...
The above observations btw predate but are consistent with the just-posted review of the SW-8 by the Alpha Audio (AA) guys where they complained it was almost too detailed and holographic ('too much of a good thing'), but was the ideal switch to prove to sceptics that they make a difference. The funny thing with that sentiment is it's not the switch 'sounding' like that, it is the streaming endpoint/DAC doing that/being able to perform like that based on the super clean data stream they're provided. I'm not going to speculate on the precise technical mechanism of action that explains this, I mean it'd be cool to know, but I certainly don't wish to debate it here. AA:
Think of very large imaging, extreme detail, separation of instruments… sky… and a very black background. It's pretty bizarre what this switch does. Frankly, this is the perfect example to persuade a 'non-believer'. It's almost extreme.
In their recent switch test the Delock FMC that AA tried just had a stock PS, as did all the switches, as it would've just made the test too unwieldy to introduce another variable of linear PSs. So not a fair comparison to the LHY, but it still rated well.
There's a guy on another thread who has FMCs + linear PS > SW-8 > externally clocked R26 and reckons this works very well. I'll have to try this once I've back home after our summer Christmas break.
m-i-c-k-e-y
Headphoneus Supremus
FMC is just a $60 upgrade (w/o LPS) minimum. Best tweak so far for me. Can't wait for an upgrade to ER2 when it comes 1Q next year.
