[sahmen]

Deleted

 

[sahmen]

Those R2R chips in Pasithea gets hot and since we keep it on all the time so for longevity I would not stack it on top even with feet and
Congrats on new DAC

Thanks, man.

 

[gonintendo]

I've had the morpheus for a while now and it's my first NOS dac. It messed me up as it is simply the best dac I have tried in terms of timbre, naturalness, and space (up to the $3000 price limit). That being said, when I A/B it with oversampling DACs I do feel like I'm missing out on some things (like bass texture and top end resolution) so I decided to give HQPlayer a shot as it slots into my roon setup relatively painlessly. Let me tell you, this was exactly what I wanted and I think you'd be hard pressed to beat this combo without spending much much more money (I picked the morpheus up used for under $2000). HQPlayer adds a level of clarity to transients on this dac that I didn't think it could do. It retains its natural texture and timbre, but everything is much more coherent sounding without losing even an ounce of musicality. I can highly recommend the combo if you can easily get HQ player set up on your system (if you run a roon server to a raspberry pi like I do and want help with it, feel free to PM and I can try to help).

To those who consider oversampling a digital feed to be sacrilege, I understand how you might think that's a bad thing considering how many oversampling dacs sound, and when you think of plugging in an old 480p console into your brand new 1080p tv back in 2006, but in audio oversampling is not so much a bonus feature as it is a necessary part of reconstructing a digital audio signal. If you've ever studied signal processing this is clear. The problem is, that especially at low sampling rates like 44.1khz, you basically need an ideal filter to not lose any information, which is very difficult and computationally expensive to implement. This is why NOS dacs are a curious thing. They are objectively extremely wrong and yet many of them sound way better than oversampling dacs in the ways I've mentioned, and the ways many of us have experienced. The positives outweigh the negatives of not fully reconstructing the recorded audio signal (and the more well implemented the NOS dac is, the stronger those positives are, like on Cees's dacs). This is only true because the quality of filter needed to invert that tradeoff is very high. I would say with some processing power, HQPlayer can get you pretty close to that ideal. I haven't tried A/Bing because of the latency HQPlayer adds, but I sincerely believe that adding a high tap filter in HQPlayer to my morpheus has lost me nothing and only given me a better sounding signal. So yes, I agree with you that many oversampling dacs sound plain bad, but that's not a function of oversampling per se, but rather inadequate oversampling. And I do believe that no oversampling on a good ladder dac is better than bad oversampling, but I think good oversampling is better even still.

I really suggest anyone with one of these dacs give HQPlayer a shot if you haven't, it's free to try and if you have roon the setup is nowhere near as daunting as you might have been led to believe

 

[kumar402]

I've had the morpheus for a while now and it's my first NOS dac. It messed me up as it is simply the best dac I have tried in terms of timbre, naturalness, and space (up to the $3000 price limit). That being said, when I A/B it with oversampling DACs I do feel like I'm missing out on some things (like bass texture and top end resolution) so I decided to give HQPlayer a shot as it slots into my roon setup relatively painlessly. Let me tell you, this was exactly what I wanted and I think you'd be hard pressed to beat this combo without spending much much more money (I picked the morpheus up used for under $2000). HQPlayer adds a level of clarity to transients on this dac that I didn't think it could do. It retains its natural texture and timbre, but everything is much more coherent sounding without losing even an ounce of musicality. I can highly recommend the combo if you can easily get HQ player set up on your system (if you run a roon server to a raspberry pi like I do and want help with it, feel free to PM and I can try to help).

To those who consider oversampling a digital feed to be sacrilege, I understand how you might think that's a bad thing considering how many oversampling dacs sound, and when you think of plugging in an old 480p console into your brand new 1080p tv back in 2006, but in audio oversampling is not so much a bonus feature as it is a necessary part of reconstructing a digital audio signal. If you've ever studied signal processing this is clear. The problem is, that especially at low sampling rates like 44.1khz, you basically need an ideal filter to not lose any information, which is very difficult and computationally expensive to implement. This is why NOS dacs are a curious thing. They are objectively extremely wrong and yet many of them sound way better than oversampling dacs in the ways I've mentioned, and the ways many of us have experienced. The positives outweigh the negatives of not fully reconstructing the recorded audio signal (and the more well implemented the NOS dac is, the stronger those positives are, like on Cees's dacs). This is only true because the quality of filter needed to invert that tradeoff is very high. I would say with some processing power, HQPlayer can get you pretty close to that ideal. I haven't tried A/Bing because of the latency HQPlayer adds, but I sincerely believe that adding a high tap filter in HQPlayer to my morpheus has lost me nothing and only given me a better sounding signal. So yes, I agree with you that many oversampling dacs sound plain bad, but that's not a function of oversampling per se, but rather inadequate oversampling. And I do believe that no oversampling on a good ladder dac is better than bad oversampling, but I think good oversampling is better even still.

I really suggest anyone with one of these dacs give HQPlayer a shot if you haven't, it's free to try and if you have roon the setup is nowhere near as daunting as you might have been led to believe

If you want to go above 192Khz then get SU-6, connect Morpheus via I2S with it and your laptop via USB to SU-6 and you can go up to 384Khz via I2S and you won’t be disappointed

 

[gonintendo]

If you want to go above 192Khz then get SU-6, connect Morpheus via I2S with it and your laptop via USB and you can go up to 384Khz via I2S and you won’t be disappointed

I’m working on it! The lead times on the i2s adapters are pretty long it seems. The SU6 made a difference even over aes though

 

[kumar402]

I’m working on it! The lead times on the i2s adapters are pretty long it seems. The SU6 made a difference even over aes though

ya get I2S module and the DAC will scale further

 

[viggen]

Does non-oversampled software playing through an oversampling hardware = oversampled software playing through an nonoversampling hardware?

 

[gonintendo]

Does non-oversampled software playing through an oversampling hardware = oversampled software playing through an nonoversampling hardware?

Possibly but not necessarily, some nos dacs have an analog low pass filter that you can’t turn off (and some, like the sonnet dacs don't) and theres a million different ways to implement an OS DAC

 

[sajunky]

The problem is, that especially at low sampling rates like 44.1khz, you basically need an ideal filter to not lose any information, which is very difficult and computationally expensive to implement. This is why NOS dacs are a curious thing. They are objectively extremely wrong and yet many of them sound way better than oversampling dacs in the ways I've mentioned, and the ways many of us have experienced. The positives outweigh the negatives of not fully reconstructing the recorded audio signal (and the more well implemented the NOS dac is, the stronger those positives are, like on Cees's dacs). This is only true because the quality of filter needed to invert that tradeoff is very high.

I don't get why NOS DACs are "objectively extremely wrong". It sounds like scientology propaganda behind this statemement. Human sensors are digital, we don't need to reconstruct full analogue waveform to pickup a content. In fact most of NOS brands do not have full reconstruction filter. Those who do, have to additionally deal with 3dB HF roll-of, it make even more complicated design without sonic benefits.

Negatives are few. NOS DAC require quality downstream amplification. Tube amp or a quality non-feedback discrete amp with distortion free bandwith at least 100kHz. So popular nested-feedback amps like aaa 789 produce black background during fast transients, removing most of NOS sound. If you benefit from upsampling, you probably have one of such "ultra low" distortion amp.

This comes to a comment about your push for HQPlayer. Get a right amp and enjoy NOS playing music as it was mastered in studio. If you insist for upsampling, there is a free PGGB add on to the Foobar 2000. It does the same, with better quality.

 

[kumar402]

I don't get why NOS DACs are "objectively extremely wrong". It sounds like scientology propaganda behind this statemement. Human sensors are digital, we don't need to reconstruct full analogue waveform to pickup a content. In fact most of NOS brands do not have full reconstruction filter. Those who do, have to additionally deal with 3dB HF roll-of, it make even more complicated design without sonic benefits.

Negatives are few. NOS DAC require quality downstream amplification. Tube amp or a quality non-feedback discrete amp with distortion free bandwith at least 100kHz. So popular nested-feedback amps like aaa 789 produce black background during fast transients, removing most of NOS sound. If you benefit from upsampling, you probably have one of such "ultra low" distortion amp.

This comes to a comment about your push for HQPlayer. Get a right amp and enjoy NOS playing music as it was mastered in studio. If you insist for upsampling, there is a free PGGB add on to the Foobar 2000. It does the same, with better quality.

Wow I didn't know PGGB is free. I thought it was $1000 software.

 

[gonintendo]

I don't get why NOS DACs are "objectively extremely wrong". It sounds like scientology propaganda behind this statemement. Human sensors are digital, we don't need to reconstruct full analogue waveform to pickup a content. In fact most of NOS brands do not have full reconstruction filter. Those who do, have to additionally deal with 3dB HF roll-of, it make even more complicated design without sonic benefits.

Negatives are few. NOS DAC require quality downstream amplification. Tube amp or a quality non-feedback discrete amp with distortion free bandwith at least 100kHz. So popular nested-feedback amps like aaa 789 produce black background during fast transients, removing most of NOS sound. If you benefit from upsampling, you probably have one of such "ultra low" distortion amp.

This comes to a comment about your push for HQPlayer. Get a right amp and enjoy NOS playing music as it was mastered in studio. If you insist for upsampling, there is a free PGGB add on to the Foobar 2000. It does the same, with better quality.

NOS DACs alias into the audible band (through inter modulation distortion of aliased images, this can be minimized by good ladder and output stage design but not eliminated) and have high frequency roll off. Are these the worst things in the world? Subjectively in my opinion no, and often they’re less bad than what a bad filter does. But as for a dac doing its job of reproducing a recorded analog signal this is suboptimal.

I listen on a zero feedback SET amp that sounds lovely on NOS and with HQPlayer, I just happen to like what hqplayer does to the sound subjectively

 

[gonintendo]

PGGB seems cool but the fact that HQPlayer does real time is nice, so I can use it with streaming services. I have no qualms with paying for well engineered software

 

[kumar402]

I see both points...I usually run my DAC in NOS but I also happen to have HQPLAYER which I use when I feel like using it and some filters do make transients faster or sharper ..some may like it.
However most of the time I run without it.

 

[kumar402]

I used PGGB to convert few albums to 384Khz but the album size ended up like 7Gb on an avg

 

[gonintendo]

Yeah I do ultimately agree that whatever sounds best is best, this is a great sounding nos dac.