According to Passion for Sound, this DAC in his opinion sounds better to him than Spring 3, and with HQPlayer pulls well ahead of the Iggy, a comparison between the Cyan 2 and this DAC using HQPlayer should be done to see if there's any point in going to the Laiv Harmony instead of the Cyan 2, if the performance justifies paying more than double what the Cyan costs, besides having more creature comforts and the aesthetics and higher quality build, now I think there's another youtube reviewer that has both of them and I think he said that he prefers the sound of the Laiv Harmony, he mostly does IEMs and portable equipment but also has his foot in the headphone world with some pretty high end equipment.
Do you have DAC correction turned on in the matrix pipeline in HQP?
Mac Mini M4? If a DSD512 capable Mac Mini or Studio was available back when I was looking and wasn’t insane money (the Studios get up there) I’d have much preferred to go that way, as prefer the compactness, silence and aesthetics. If the Mini M4 delivers DSD512 with better HQP modulators and filters, well that’d be most excellent for DSD DAC owners.
Honestly that was a genius move by Laiv to make the entire DAC modular, hope they do the same for their upcoming amp to complete the insane combo.
dericchan1
500+ Head-Fier
Yes and that would be by your own choice to overkill it. Reality is you need way less to do dsd upsampling. I felt I made a “mistake” and bought my 13600k with a 3080ti to meet the specs for hqplayer but 1) Miska has made hqp5 so much more efficient compared to hqp4, my pc is way overkill for dsd512 even with dac correction 2) sweet spot for most direct dsd dacs are actually at dsd256 anyway and it turns out me and along with a number of my friends who own holo cyan 2, spring 3 kte and May just ended up much preferring with dsd256 so going dsd512 again is overkill. 3) the only dac i find that is better suited for dsd512 is the dsc2 but my 13600k even without gpu is already sufficient. 4) fortunately, now I am also using the pc for gaming with the kids so i didn’t really wasted the pc…I had a quick look again just now and realised that my criteria was if I was buying a better PC I wanted to buy once with as much processing capability as poss in a compact and quiet form factor.. so was looking at Extreme Raptor Canyon NUCs. Might’ve been even more expensive a year back, add a good video card to the below an it gets into the price range I recall, especially over here in NZ with 15% GST and a smaller market.
https://www.geeknuc.com/products/in...HXHiVRi-wKNnOFyKrlCs6DkR155GmOeqHX_LxB5glrGLA
BShaw
1000+ Head-Fier
yeah it's allegedly being released this year, and since my M2 can't quite crack DSD 512, but has no problem with anything in 256, it looks like the performance increases might get it in range for DSD 512, but I haven't seen any bench tests. The jump from the 2018 to the M2 was pretty big. I think the M4 will have additional cores.
At least it would be able to play any chosen filter, with DAC correction I'm assuming. I take it back, the M2 struggles with a couple of the bigger filters. No problem with PCM 1536 though.
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Cheers - appreciate the first hand experiences. I don’t disagree re overkill but I guess in part i wanted to mirror the Mac Mini form factor as much as poss and to play it safe and not be disappointed by finding it couldn’t quite run say Sinc-L at DSD512 with ECv3. I’d be forever wondering what I’m missing, may as well spend the little extra to be sure. And then there’s DSD1024 of course, another league again that was well beyond my aspirations.
How about the DAC200.. what’s the preference there between DSD256 and 512?
plumpudding2
500+ Head-Fier
yes
can't do DSD512 with correction turned on though, so i'm limited to 256 or 1024 with AHM7EC5L
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I also have problems with DSD512 with my i9-9900k and RTX4070, but DSD256 sounds way better to me on my Cyan 2 than PCM at even the highest rate possible.yes
Not sure if the Liav
Thx,
will try those modulators!
This is good advice.
@Chibs I have an M1 16GB too. Got pretty familiar with its limits converting PCM to DSD with the R26. It is possible to do DSD512 but not with the very best modulstors like the 7EC-Super, and only with easier filters. I found the best sound was with DSD256 and better modulators like the 7EC-Super and ECv3, and the ability to at least use/try longer filters like Sinc MGa or L as the mood takes me. Though even on DSD256 the very longest filters (Sinc-L IIRC) would still drop out eventually.
The M1 16GB gives one tantalisingly glimpses (1-2secs - 30 secs depending) of life at DSD512 on some better sounding filter/modulator combos and it is a seductive sound indeed. Some combos just don’t work at all or for fractions of a second so you can get no sense of the sound. It got me looking into getting a more powerful computer with some helpful comments upthread, but got expensive fast.
Ultimately became a moot point with the move to the LAiV which as you know only has PCM ladders so doesn’t do native DSD, the M1 being more than capable of PCM oversampling to its PCM768 max on all filters.
@LoryWiv it does accept DSD512, but converts it, why they don’t officially specify this I’m not sure.
Thx,
will try those modulators!
dericchan1
500+ Head-Fier
I don't own a DAC200 so I would not comment on it.
For the Cyan 2, DSD512 would have about 3db higher audible band noise than DSD256. DSD1024 would have about 6 db higher audible band noise than DSD256.
I can tolerate listening to DSD512 with the Cyan 2 but DSD1024 would be too far stretch as the increase in noise are pretty audible.
Some DACs may subject to less gain in audible band noise going up the DSD rates but its a pattern that your noise floor goes higher in higher DSD rate.
dericchan1
500+ Head-Fier
There is nothing wrong if you prefer to have higher audio band noise (think tubes) but you might as well just add tubes to the chain rather than spending $3k on a pc capable to run dsd1024
I presume there are qualitative sound differences beyond merely the noise level if it starts from a very low level , some positives to be balanced with that negative? My experience around this has been limited.. the R26 had a hiss on its noise floor on 44.1 rate family DSD that would’ve been much higher than 6dB* and yet qualitatively to my ear DSD still sounded more resolving and spacious than PCM and DSD512 was better than DSD256 on equivalent modulators and filters. Noise (floor?) level is but one factor in subjective sound quality and not necessarily the dominant one from my experience is all I’m saying.
*it bugged others so much they couldn’t listen to it, I was more relaxed, could look/listen past it, but a definite implementation fault.
*it bugged others so much they couldn’t listen to it, I was more relaxed, could look/listen past it, but a definite implementation fault.
dericchan1
500+ Head-Fier
Of course there is, how everyone perceives noise can be purely subjective. Noise does not have to be a bad thing, you may actually prefer a higher noise floor, if it helps mask some of the details or tame some of the forwardness… especially true if you don’t have tubes in the chain, the additional noise with higher dsd rates may even serve similar functions as tubes
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