Benchmark Media Systems' DAC3 With ES9028PRO 32-bit Audio DAC
Benchmark Media Systems' DAC3 With ES9028PRO 32-bit Audio DACBenchmark Media Systems' new DAC3 takes advantage of the all-new ES9028PRO 32-bit audio D/A converter. It has been a little over seven years since ESS Technology introduced the revolutionary ES9018 audio D/A converter chip. This converter delivered a major improvement in audio conversion and as you may recall Enjoy the Music.com announced the new ESS Technology ES9028PRO within our Industry News page a while back. For several months, Benchmark Media Systems has been working with some early samples of the new ES9028PRO converter chip and have conducted numerous measurements and listening tests and came away very impressed! Benchmark Media System's new DAC3 HGC is a high-performance version of the popular DAC2 HGC. The DAC3 L is a high-performance version of the DAC2 L for users who don't need a headphone amplifier. The Benchmark DAC3 is one of the first products worldwide to take advantage of the new ES9028PRO converter chip. The ES9028PRO has an improved selection of filters and overall better performance over the previous chip. New filtering exceeds the pass-band performance of the best filter available in the older ES9018. It is important to note that the DAC2 and DAC3 converters frequency-shift the selected built-in filter by driving the converter chip at a fixed 211 kHz sample rate. This frequency shifting places the near-Nyquist region entirely above the audio band. The Benchmark upsampling system completely eliminates the time-domain errors that would have been produced by the built-in filter. The ES9028PRO has an improved digital phase locked loop that allows it to lock more quickly than the ES9018. How fast you ask, how does a high precision lock in less than 6 milliseconds sound to you? This has allowed for Benchmark Media Systems' new UltraLock3 system. Benchmark's UltraLock system has near-perfect jitter attenuation and exceed the performance of the phase locked loop that is located inside the ESS converter chips. Ultra-fast phase-accurate settling of the new UltraLock3 system allows seamless switching between digital inputs. The DAC3 input selector is suitable for conducting A/B comparisons between two digital inputs. Performance and complexity of the support circuitry outside of the ES9028PRO can be configured to match a manufacturer's budget and space constraints. Overall performance will be determined by the manufacturer's budget, goals, and skills. Within the DAC3, Benchmark uses the following techniques to maximize the performance of the ES9028PRO:
4:1 channel summing - improves the SNR by 6 dB
External I-V converters - lower noise and lower distortion
Do we have a definitive review of any DAC based on 9028/9038? Specifically..how this new generation of chips steers people (me) from R2R based designs. Yes, I've googled...no formal magazine reviews nor 'first impressions'.
The Ayre QX-5 Twenty DAC was the first to use the new ES9038PRO and was recently reviewed by Audiostream. Initial user comments on this unit are very favorable, with some comparing it favorably to other significantly more expensive DACs.
I will just say that there is so much forum chatter at the R2R/FPGA DaC level. Chip DACs, regardless of advancement have dropped out of favour(fashion) so fast...yeah they may sound good, but nobody cares for a me-too product.
I think FPGA DACs will be a phase. It's more that companies were not satisfied with the results or performance of SOC DAC solutions on the market and needed to figure out their own way of going above and beyond chips like the Sabre DAC. FPGAs granted them the additional computing power and the flexibility to refine the D/A process.
However, as history has shown us, companies like ESS or ARM listen to market demands and incorporate 90% of what specialized applications achieve in a high volume, low-cost solution. They then market the hell out of it, price it aggressively and most customers no longer see the value in costly specialized applications. Subsequently, companies also see a better profit margin with a high volume, low cost component that delivers 90% of what a more costly and complex solution provided.
Sound is one of those things that as you get more and more performance, you get closer to an end goal that doesn't really grow in complexity, due to the limitations of human hearing. This is why I believe there will be an end (eventually) to the arms race for the perfect DAC. This is unlike other forms of data processing where there is an infinite possibility for greater computing power and greater results each time.
The Ayre DX-5 DAC was the first to use the new ES9038PRO and was recently reviewed by Audiostream. Initial user comments on this unit are very favorable, with some comparing it favorably to other significantly more expensive DACs.
^ Still, nobody else has an ES9038Pro DAC as low as Oppo's $799 offering. Other manufacturer's ESS ES9038Pro implementations are priced far higher than the Oppo Sonica DAC.
L.K.S. wants $1260 for the "standard USB" version of their dual ES9038PRO, so some might argue that's a better deal than the Oppo Sonica DAC, in that L.K.S. isn't asking $1600 (twice the cost of a Sonica).
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. This is what I had been waiting on
