Zhaolu D2.0 shows up at TubeCAD!

[eVITAERC]

For those of you who are in the dark, TubeCAD is probably the Internet's foremost collection of audio tube circuits and ideas. Site owner John Broskie have been widely regarded as a purveyor of interesting tube circuits, and his Aikido tube amp have seen almost nothing but praise in the DIY community. Many of the DIY tube headphone amp projects hosted at HeadWize contain traces of circuit ideas first appearing at TubeCAD. Needless to say, what Broskie says seem to carry a lot of weight in the tube amplifier community.

Which is why it's interesting that in his blog entry on Wednesday he inadvertently featured the Zhaolu D2. In this entry he mentioned the European Triode Festival, and its competition this year for DACs with tube output stages. The winner of the competition this year was using the Aikido circuit as a DAC output stage, at fact which Broskie mentioned proudly. To quote:
Quote:

Periklis mated a cheap Chinese DAC to an Aikido circuit from this journal (blog 77) and housed the project in a wood case from Ikea.

What is this "cheap Chinese DAC"? Why, he has a picture to show us. Of course, it's the Zhaolu D2! Talk about a win for the frugalphile. Those of you dabbling with hyping up the Zhaolu's output stage either with opamp rolling or going discrete can now rest easy knowing that he digital part of the Zhaolu stood its own in a world class shootout!

 

[Jon L]

Quote:

Originally Posted by eVITAERC /img/forum/go_quote.gif For those of you who are in the dark, TubeCAD is probably the Internet's foremost collection of audio tube circuits and ideas. Site owner John Broskie have been widely regarded as a purveyor of interesting tube circuits, and his Aikido tube amp have seen almost nothing but praise in the DIY community. Many of the DIY tube headphone amp projects hosted at HeadWize contain traces of circuit ideas first appearing at TubeCAD. Needless to say, what Broskie says seem to carry a lot of weight in the tube amplifier community. Which is why it's interesting that in his blog entry on Wednesday he inadvertently featured the Zhaolu D2. In this entry he mentioned the European Triode Festival, and its competition this year for DACs with tube output stages. The winner of the competition this year was using the Aikido circuit as a DAC output stage, at fact which Broskie mentioned proudly. To quote: What is this "cheap Chinese DAC"? Why, he has a picture to show us. Of course, it's the Zhaolu D2! Talk about a win for the frugalphile. Those of you dabbling with hyping up the Zhaolu's output stage either with opamp rolling or going discrete can now rest easy knowing that he digital part of the Zhaolu stood its own in a world class shootout!

Here's another view of that Zhaolu/Aikido DAC.

And here's a 6Moons coverage of the whole European Triode Festival. A tube-lust fest for sure!
http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/etf06/etf.html

About the DAC shootout, I found this paragraph both educational and hilarious:

"The finale was a toss-up because one of the two finalists did not survive the finish line. The winning design was by Periklis Gurdouparis from Greece. It had very cheap Chinese D/A-chips and lots of tubes in it. The following day, Bruno Putzeys of uCD/Philips spoke about making audio measurements using DACs. He had three of them. One was last evening's winner, the second a non-oversampling design and the third his own brainchild. The shoot-out winner measured fairly decently, showing a typical distribution of distortion components from a tubed output stage. The non-oversampling DAC was more wanting in this respect but Putzeys didn't condemn such designs entirely. His own DAC measured essentially perfect - the measurement values were as good as they can be in practice. Interestingly, Putzeys was rather pessimistic about his DAC's possible success in a shootout like the one organized the evening before. The reason was that tubes are so euphonic. If nothing else but sound matters, tubes are hard to beat, said Putzeys. That's from probably the most knowledgeable man on Class D amps on the planet."