idabgamgsx9754
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2016
- Posts
- 27
- Likes
- 13
I've been using my Gustard X12 for the better part of a year, and I'm surprised there's not much more discussion about this wonderful DAC. I bought this and have been quietly enjoying it for all this time and just wanted to put in my two cents.
First, ESS/Sabre ES9018. Any DAC designer has a lot of choices, first and foremost is what chip goes into the heart of the design. And anyone picking Sabre chips at the top end of the spectrum is choosing speed, an inhuman, raw speed meant to reconstruct music molecule by molecule, rendering sample by sample so there's not one atom of sound left missing. So just as a car designer that chooses a high revving F1 engine for a production car, it would be asinine to make design choices to result in a grocery getter when it's meant to collect tickets, an audio designer still has choices on what parts to mate to the ES9018. So if I'm going to choose a DAC for tube-like lushness, I would expect the designer to design around tubes instead of making a faked up facsimile of the real thing. And if the designer is going to go for inhuman precision, I would like to see the design choices bent towards more of the same.
Here's the proof. First, the beautifully laid out boards, every part and trace purposefully drawn with a flair for beauty. Holy smokes, if they only made this thing demonstrator-style, with a crystal clear glass enclosure to match the sound signature. Each major section laid out in place by hand, no laziness, no auto layout. And oh, the black PCBs, black caps, black heat sinks, black daughterboards, you get the idea <3. Second, the menagerie of digital input types: an I2S input, seriously? AES/EBU, check, optical, check, coax, of course, and then...the XMOS. Sweet--a board with an 8 core CPU just to feed the audio data from the hopper into the furnace fast enough. And then once the bits make landfall, it gets time domain jitter eliminated all the hell and resampled to perfection. Third, fully balanced outputs. Of course. Fourth, they used a CPLD for as best as I can tell for a volume control. Is this some kind of joke I wondered? Did the designer think, "i could design a volume control the normal way... or... i can make a custom microchip using a 300Mhz Altera chip" -- this is a chip that probably has more horsepower than my first home computer, and they thought "hmmm i think I could get 100 steps of volume control *perfect* if I do this one crazy thing...." (this is my best guess on what's happening here
But now, the flip side of this. The outside of this thing has not an ounce of industrial design. If I called this thing a black plastic shoebox i would be spitting on the honor of real black plastic shoeboxes all over the universe. Oh, and the amateur hour push button interface that a high school kid with an arduino could've improved on. I mean really, would it have killed whoever made this thing to have put a volume knob? You're making me scroll through a menu to modify the volume settings?
The sound: Sadly, if I put my engineer's hat on, the spirit of nyquist, horns and all, would be sitting on my shoulder wagging the finger of shame. 384khz sample rate? 32 bits? Overkill! But, with my perfectionist hat on, beauty brings pleasure. Maybe I'm stupid to sample an LP to super high sample rates so I record every scratch and iota of noise, but maybe the magic is in that noise, and the perfection in the imperfection is digitized so maybe only dogs can tell the difference but here is a ugly as hell black plastic shoebox that can reassemble all of that bit by bit, sample by sample, until every part of it is perfected and reconstituted back to life. And for those rare originally made studio mastered recordings in ultra high sample rate audio that ARE out there, really, really wonderful.
I listen to movies with this thing, and there's no lack for bass and theatrics. No surprise, since the Sabre pedigree is deepest when it comes to the home theatre world. But if I had to quantify the "sound" of this DAC, it would be transparency. I have this sitting in a place in my audio chain where a Preamp would sit, and I've compared this to my all-analog tube setup, and it doesn't have the lushness of my other setup. I've run sweeps, and various test CDs, and unlike my tube setup, I can't distinguish whether the clarity that i'm hearing is the DAC or the rest of my gear. So mission accomplished, the X12 is transparently connecting the source to the speaker. Nothing added, nothing taken.
My setup: Plex --Network--> Apple iMac --USB--> Gustard X12
Hope this helps.
First, ESS/Sabre ES9018. Any DAC designer has a lot of choices, first and foremost is what chip goes into the heart of the design. And anyone picking Sabre chips at the top end of the spectrum is choosing speed, an inhuman, raw speed meant to reconstruct music molecule by molecule, rendering sample by sample so there's not one atom of sound left missing. So just as a car designer that chooses a high revving F1 engine for a production car, it would be asinine to make design choices to result in a grocery getter when it's meant to collect tickets, an audio designer still has choices on what parts to mate to the ES9018. So if I'm going to choose a DAC for tube-like lushness, I would expect the designer to design around tubes instead of making a faked up facsimile of the real thing. And if the designer is going to go for inhuman precision, I would like to see the design choices bent towards more of the same.
Here's the proof. First, the beautifully laid out boards, every part and trace purposefully drawn with a flair for beauty. Holy smokes, if they only made this thing demonstrator-style, with a crystal clear glass enclosure to match the sound signature. Each major section laid out in place by hand, no laziness, no auto layout. And oh, the black PCBs, black caps, black heat sinks, black daughterboards, you get the idea <3. Second, the menagerie of digital input types: an I2S input, seriously? AES/EBU, check, optical, check, coax, of course, and then...the XMOS. Sweet--a board with an 8 core CPU just to feed the audio data from the hopper into the furnace fast enough. And then once the bits make landfall, it gets time domain jitter eliminated all the hell and resampled to perfection. Third, fully balanced outputs. Of course. Fourth, they used a CPLD for as best as I can tell for a volume control. Is this some kind of joke I wondered? Did the designer think, "i could design a volume control the normal way... or... i can make a custom microchip using a 300Mhz Altera chip" -- this is a chip that probably has more horsepower than my first home computer, and they thought "hmmm i think I could get 100 steps of volume control *perfect* if I do this one crazy thing...." (this is my best guess on what's happening here
But now, the flip side of this. The outside of this thing has not an ounce of industrial design. If I called this thing a black plastic shoebox i would be spitting on the honor of real black plastic shoeboxes all over the universe. Oh, and the amateur hour push button interface that a high school kid with an arduino could've improved on. I mean really, would it have killed whoever made this thing to have put a volume knob? You're making me scroll through a menu to modify the volume settings?
The sound: Sadly, if I put my engineer's hat on, the spirit of nyquist, horns and all, would be sitting on my shoulder wagging the finger of shame. 384khz sample rate? 32 bits? Overkill! But, with my perfectionist hat on, beauty brings pleasure. Maybe I'm stupid to sample an LP to super high sample rates so I record every scratch and iota of noise, but maybe the magic is in that noise, and the perfection in the imperfection is digitized so maybe only dogs can tell the difference but here is a ugly as hell black plastic shoebox that can reassemble all of that bit by bit, sample by sample, until every part of it is perfected and reconstituted back to life. And for those rare originally made studio mastered recordings in ultra high sample rate audio that ARE out there, really, really wonderful.
I listen to movies with this thing, and there's no lack for bass and theatrics. No surprise, since the Sabre pedigree is deepest when it comes to the home theatre world. But if I had to quantify the "sound" of this DAC, it would be transparency. I have this sitting in a place in my audio chain where a Preamp would sit, and I've compared this to my all-analog tube setup, and it doesn't have the lushness of my other setup. I've run sweeps, and various test CDs, and unlike my tube setup, I can't distinguish whether the clarity that i'm hearing is the DAC or the rest of my gear. So mission accomplished, the X12 is transparently connecting the source to the speaker. Nothing added, nothing taken.
My setup: Plex --Network--> Apple iMac --USB--> Gustard X12
Hope this helps.
