[flyte3333]

Good point. I was focusing on Yggdrassil, which I believe is still their flagship, but I haven’t checked their portfolio as of late.

Still, SNR might not be as huge an issue if the harmonics are good, right?

Possibly but the biggest glaring disappointment (to me) is the headphone power output...

 

[schalliol]

I heard back from CEntrance, they of course feel he didn’t spend time to understand the product, which I totally agree with. I am excited to have the unit based on the design. They did want to see the unit based on some of the values Amir recorded. I’m going to have it shipped back to CEntrance and will report back.

I have to say that there’s an audibly better level of performance with this unit on my HD-650 via XLR-4 than the V1, and the short time I had with it was really positive. I don’t claim to have golden ears, but I definitely didn’t experience issues like he did with distortion.

 

[Nostoi]

If I may ask a genuine question, what is the motivation to send the unit to ASR? If you like the product, which it seems many people do, what difference do measurements make?

 

[schalliol]

Just public service as others were interested. I also thought it might help appreciation of the product more because CEntrance spent a long time making a product to be a flagship and I thought it would test well.

I want my equipment to reproduce what was intended, and I’m interested in learning how it does it. That’s one of the reasons I bought my HD 800 a decade ago, it did basically the best job across the range If equipment can’t reproduce the music properly, it’s not a good product. I’m not of the opinion that you can only review a product through the numbers since some numbers aren’t in the audible range, but many numbers show where the sound isn’t going to properly be produced.

In the short time I used the V2 before sending, I did like it, but I didn’t fully put it through its paces. It was immediately audibly better than the V1.

 

[flyte3333]

I want my equipment to reproduce what was intended

A very reasonable thing to ask, i.e. "does it do what it says on the can.."

This is the value in 3rd party measurements in my opinion... assuming they're done properly of course.

"Garbage in = garbage out" in the measurement world.

 

[elira]

The power is not near to what they promised. And distortion and noise are too high. I’m very disappointed.

 

[schalliol]

I'm not ready to write it off just yet because CEntrance is surprised by results when of course they've tested it too. There are some possibilities beyond the possibility that it's just not as strong of a product as planned:

1. My unit just is defective. Hey that wouldn't be cool, but stuff happens. Maybe they can address it.
2. His measurements are off. It sounds like he had a hard time using it, and while it is what he does, maybe there was some user error there. I don't think it's super likely, but hey, this is test one of one.
3. Maybe some of these initial units aren't working quite right and they need to make fixes.

 

[Maru10]

I'm not ready to write it off just yet because CEntrance is surprised by results when of course they've tested it too. There are some possibilities beyond the possibility that it's just not as strong of a product as planned:

1. My unit just is defective. Hey that wouldn't be cool, but stuff happens. Maybe they can address it.
2. His measurements are off. It sounds like he had a hard time using it, and while it is what he does, maybe there was some user error there. I don't think it's super likely, but hey, this is test one of one.
3. Maybe some of these initial units aren't working quite right and they need to make fixes.

Maybe. Maybe some part of the amplifier stage is bypassed due to the PCB fault. Let us see. You will keep us posted, right?

 

[schalliol]

Will keep you posted! It’s very clear that some of the results aren’t what we were expecting, but I do know that this business and any others making products like this is putting a massive amount of time and resources into developing them for our community. Since starting this thread, I’ve seen the company has been listening here with regards to design. I figure we out to give it a shot.

 

[elira]

I hadn't notice that the power specs published by CEntrance are not per channel, so it has less than 1W per channel. The power and distortion measurements seem to match the specs published by CEntrance. So I don't think we'll see changes on the measurements.

 

[newworld666]

Unfortunately it was not tested In balance mode .. and no idea if the amp was tested in battery mode or not
Figures can be different in both cases..

So at this stage, I am still hoping for 1.4W per channel at 32 Ohms and some very good capacitors with a huge margin of peak voltage (20V ?). These figures are still more or less unique on the market and entrance ticket for difficult headphones to drive like Heddphone by Hedd.

 

[mgoodman]

We reached out to Amir and will he checking out his unit. Will be sending him another one once we understand what happened. Will be sending another unit to the customer of course.

Some things in the review do appear off, so we will need to see what happened. It seemed like it was a quick review, where Amir didn't even check out the cool side outputs, the BT input, the meters, the EQ, the battery life, the stamina mode, and some other things. We also suspect he was expecting this to be a desktop DAC and evaluated it as such. But it's not that. It's a portable DAC with a lot of flexibility. So we are working to address these clarifications with Amir to have a better picture.

 

[elira]

@mgoodman I have a question, why is the Bluetooth mode more energy efficient than USB? Aren’t both of them using the same DAC and amp?

 

[mgoodman]

@mgoodman I have a question, why is the Bluetooth mode more energy efficient than USB? Aren’t both of them using the same DAC and amp?

USB chip uses way more energy. About 150 mA at 3.3V, compared to 30 mA for the BT receiver. That's a considerable difference.

 

[newworld666]

USB chip uses way more energy. About 150 mA at 3.3V, compared to 30 mA for the BT receiver. That's a considerable difference.

It's a bit of pity that LDAC is not included in the Bluetooth receiver. Actually I get pretty good BT results with my WM1A and my actual external DAC/AMP (unfortunately limited to 1W in unbalanced mode only).