Hi b0bb if you don’t mind can you give rough idea on pure sonics stock SU1 vs stock SU2 vs stock SU6, like from a scale 1 to 10.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best
SU1 --> 2
SU2 --> 4
SU6 --> 7
SU2 fixes the harshness overly bright presentation of the SU1. SU2 presentation is much warmer and less fatiguing than the SU1
SU2 imaging is a narrower less focused version of the SU6, it drops a lot of microdetails, percussion impact is flat compared to the SU6.
SU2 imaging is pleasant but not accurate, quite hazy compared to the SU6
but I am thinking as SU2 is a very new design utilizing latest tech this may actually approach or even surpass the SU6.
Not from where I am standing, the replacement for the SU2 needs to have a 100MHz or better master clock input to compete with the equal footing with the SU6.
10MHz made sense in the days of 44kHz PCM where the bitclock was 1.4MHz, with DSD1024 we are looking at 45MHz.
Modern DACs use masterclocks of 100MHz or more.
The choice of 10MHz external master clock is a major oversight, the clock output needs to be multiplied 3X to be useful for DSD512 processing, 5X for DSD1024
Jitter increases 3X as well, this 9dBc, this pretty eliminates its low noise advantage, this makes no better than some of the off the shelf oscillator.
With a 15dBc jitter increase, the master clock will be worse than the internal reference when processing DSD1024
Something that is often overlooked is the loss incurred when going to 2 boxes, there is a transmitter/receiver pair the will introduce jitter into the clock.
A external box Masterclock performance needs to be 2-3x better just to match the one built into the DDC because of these losses.
The new design is very complex with reference clocks controlling the behavior of the actual clocks.
In practice the actual clocks can get close but never quite equal the reference clocks.
The older design in the SU1 and SU6 is simpler and higher performance as it uses the reference clocks directly.
I suspect Singxer created the SU2 to compete with the some of the Gustard DDCs and cash in on the hype surrounding external 10MHz clocks.