[ooeric]

so im gonna buy a nice dac..
was wondering how good are these..

but as i read the specs and stuff used inside.. they should be pretty good..
i like how its NOS,, so the signal should be as clean as it should be when it was recorded?? (correct me)

i know there are threads on the forums about it.. but is soooo long.

the price isnt bad at all.. since if i buy it direct from HK. they include a seperate USB sound card with coax out.. and a nice looking coax cable.

or maybe get a modded one?

any opinions? or should i look at mood labs, giga lab, zero, valab, etc etc?

i think itll be a good upgrade to my POS custom mac..

yes i know.. its a pc,, but its also a mac.
and yes, i know my hd650 are terminated in xlr..
and no, i dont have enough for a nice balanced setup yet...

 

[ooeric]

no ideas??

 

[Spadge]

I have a modified lite DAC-AH.

I think there are a few things that need to be done to this DAC to make it sound it's best (but I am no expert here by any means!). To take a look at the mods done to mine have a look at the following page:

Lite DAC-AH CAA Mod MKII

I have mine connected to my SqueezeBox Duet and running to my Meier Cantate.... The DAC-AH sounds better than both the Cantate USB DAC and the Duet's internal DAC by a noticable margin.

I hope that helps a little.

Paul

 

[MaZa]

Quote:

but as i read the specs and stuff used inside.. they should be pretty good.. i like how its NOS,, so the signal should be as clean as it should be when it was recorded?? (correct me)

Not really. NOS dacs tend to suffer from treble roll off and congestion, caused by filtering or other means of protection mechanism. Without it your headphones would be damaged by high frequency noise. My modded DAC-AH does have slightly rolled of treble, but otherwise it sounds very gentle and some love that NOS sound.
Oversampling instead oversamples the signal to higher samplerate, pushing the noise faaaar above audible levels and filtering it out wont affect the music. Overampling one is more accurate overall.

Read up
Vic Trola's Audiophile Blog

 

[ooeric]

oo.

 

[compuryan]

I used to have a heavily modded dac-ah and I loved it to death. It sounded just awesome. I agree that oversampling can have more detail and accuracy, but NOS just sounds more natural. And the Lite DAC-AH is a good one. I've heard it stock too, you'll be happy. But modifications really bring out the good stuff.