My two cents:
I bought the DAC on the 2nd of April 2009, and it arrived after the Easter holiday (10 days later including the holidays). My order also included a Valab silver digital cable, so my impression is based on the combination of the DAC and the cable.
I bought the Rega Apollo last year and had not been very happy with it, so I sold it 2 months ago and then started the hunting again. I’ve listened to most of the contemporary CD players; from Bryston BCD-1 (very neutral) to YBA Passion 400 (good, really good).
Anyway, most of the CD players have their “house sound”, and that made me thinking of what exactly I have been listening to? Had I been listening to the filters that the audio designer thought was good? Or have I been listening to the records themselves? So my search had leaded me to the approach of a non-oversampling, non-filtering design.
The most famous non-oversampling design is of course the AudioNote DACs, but they are very hard to find and expensive, so naturally I went to eBay and shopping around, then I bought the Valab DAC.
My equipments:
Denon 3930 DVD player (with Audioquest power cable)-> Valab Digital SPDIF -> Valab Non-OS DAC (with Nordost Shiva power cable) -> Analyze Plus Silver Oval interconnects -> Lehmann Audio Linear (with PS Audio Power cable) -> Nordost Red Dawn interconnects -> Bryston 2BSST power amp (with PS Audio power cable) -> Nordost Red Dawn speaker -> Totem Model One signature.
Impressions:
I don’t know whether it is the non-oversampling DAC, or the non-filtering design. The sound coming out from it is the most natural, logical, and cohesive that I have ever heard in my 15 years of audio journey. I think perhaps “rational” is a better word to describe the way it reproduces the sound, and it is the sound stage that has most of the praises from me.
The sound stage is perhaps the strongest capability of this DAC. Listening to the complete symphonic recording of Les Miserables; the way that the sound stage is reproduced, is so “true” and “rational” that my mind does not need to re-adjust and re-position each singer on the stage. Too often you would have heard some equipments that give you a big sound stage, but was that true to the moment when the music is recorded? I don’t like a big sound or small sound, I just want the sound as it was recorded. I don’t want the sound of a guitar scaled like an organ pipe and vise versa. I think most of today’s mid-fi equipments are too busy to impress the buyers by twisting the sound into several imprssions, and wish the buyers can be impressed by those impressions with a 10 minutes audition in a hifi shop. You see these trends by reading the review articles; how many times you’ve seen the word “big”, “bold”, “smooth”, “warm”, “air” when reading the equipment reviews? Each of these characteristics will only distort the sound, and it is the distortions what we base our preference on. True hifi should just reproduce the music as close to the way the record engineer’s intention, and the musician’s expression.
Sorry to be off topic.. ☺, back to the DAC:
The frequency response is very too, and from my memory, it is up there with players like Cyrus CD8VS, or Arcam CD36. Both Cyrus and Arcam have their house sound, so either you like the house sound or not. Arcam is a bit more neutral than the Cyrus, but Cyrus has a better sound stage. The Cyrus is a bit faster than the Arcam.
Compare with YBA Passion 400, well, the Passion 400 is ….. very, very good. The YBA sounds very neutral good (almost like the Valab or vice versa), but the YBA has that magical mid frequency sweetness that is like a good bottle of white wine fermented in a traditional French oak barrel. I personally prefer the YBA sound, but in terms of neutrality, Valab has the upper hand. Please note that the Passion 400 costs almost 30 time more than the Valab, so an honorable comparison IMO.
Compare with Rega Apollo, well it is no comparison, at all. Not Rega’s fault, I just don’t like the Rega sound anymore.
Headphone listening pretty much matches the impression of speaker listening, my headphone is the ER4S, yes, by now you probably know that I like only the neutral sound.
So to my last comment, I think this DAC deserves a pair of very good interconnects, something like the Cardas Golden Reference, to keep its sound stage as intact as possible. If that means having a pair of interconnects that is more expensive than the DAC the let it be. The sound stage alone is priceless for me.
