project86
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2007
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Element X 2.0 should be upgrade, but i doubt original is better than D90SE...
To buy dac now would absolute mistake since new Flaship chips from AKM and Sabre are released and manufacturers are surely working on those.
Respectfully disagree. There's always a new DAC chip around the corner. We need to stop thinking about audio devices the way we think about video cards. A DAC chip is not a GPU, where each generation has clearly defined performance increases. The general implementation of the chip, plus power supply, output stage, clocking system, jitter/noise reduction, etc are all at least as important, if not more so, than the bare DAC chip itself.
Implementation is key. Name just about any DAC in existence, from modern ESS to ancient Philips, and we can almost certainly find examples of devices using that same DAC chip but sounding wildly different from one another.