Review and Measurements of Totaldac d1-six DAC

[Patatorz]

Yes it can be a reason but does it makes sense. Not answering could have been a right approach if TotalDac thinks that ASR has very low influence. Answering the way we can read it is even worse....it could have been a great moment to align the measure and the sound but I really feel it will not happen.

 

[Hephaestus]

Massive thanks for this review. I really hope that this forum will gain such momentum that snake oil industry dies away...

 

[JJB70]

How can charging 13000 Euros to do something that plenty of others do for a small fraction of the price (and do a better job) ever be considered good design? Even if we ignore stuff like the Apple dongle there are plenty of nicely made and great performing DACs in the lower hundreds of dollars price range from companies like Topping, SMSL and Grace. The March Audio DAC offers both fantastic performance and excellent industrial design at a very affordable cost. Go up and RME offers excellent functionality, impeccable measured performance for significantly less than a tenth of the price of this. I would probably rate Benchmark as the "prosumer" gold standard for engineering and their DAC is massively cheaper.
People may like the sound signature, that is a personal choice, but I would argue that a DAC should not even have a sound signature and plenty of others are able to make transparent DACs. This takes me to one of the great mysteries of audio, why are so many audiophiles pathologically averse to EQ and DSP but then buy coloured sound products?

 

[totaldac]

You can't set the sample rate of the analyzer too low or its filter response will be combined with the response of the device under test. That is why I use 192 kHz sampling normally.

I can however limit the bandwidth manually to 20 kHz. Once done, this is the results:
View attachment 30234

So the overshoot is not there anymore with the correction. However, one does not get a flat response either way despite what your website says.

Please confirm the above measurement as valid and I will update the review with it.

Note that frequency response issues was the least of the worries with your DAC.

This is better.

 

[maty]

Then the same music on the TotalDac + Vivid Giya 3, again something else. The same music for sure, but I could almost « see / feel » the musicians because rythm and 3D location are so good.

You need to try a SS preamp or amp with Single Ended topology -> predominant H2. How much? Nelson Pass and others, H2 at -73 dB. Recordings with few acoustic instruments and "natural" voices (without Autotune, vade retro satana). Problem: recordings with a lot of instruments like orchestral or modern recordings with electronic/software instrumentation. That is why it would be very interesting that you could switch between the previous harmonic profile and another without harmonics below -90 dB in the same hardware.

 

[Patatorz]

Massive thanks for this review. I really hope that this forum will gain such momentum that snake oil industry dies away...

I wonder if you are not making with one case a generality. You would argue that it is not one case but a bit radical no ?

 

[maty]

BTW, how does Totaldac d1-six sound with complex music like the orchestral? Better or worse than with the RME?

 

[totaldac]

Amir your protocole doesn't work for this NOS R2R DACs, They are too many artifacts of different kinds. You should remove this whole article, unless the aim was only to attack Totaldac.

 

[maty]

The famous R2R TDA1541A that many audiophiles love. NOS and only 16/44.

by Pedja, Jun 2006

In the meantime, I thought some you may be interested to see how some TDA1541A perform at low levels. Dithered -60dBFS sinewave is used, OPA627 as an I/V converter, the chips are TDA1541A (HSH8844), TDA1541A S1 (HSH8910), TDA1541A R1 (HSH8940) and TDA1541A (JSS9721), respectively.

TDA1541A -60dBFS, HSH8844 and OPA627

 

[soundwave76]

Amir your protocole doesn't work for this NOS R2R DACs, They are too many artifacts of different kinds. You should remove this whole article, unless the aim was only to attack Totaldac.

Seriously?

 

[maty]

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...f-wyred4sound-dac-2v2-se-dac.6507/post-145408

TDA1541A with unknown hard -> other harmonic profile. And 0 dBSPL.

 

[maty]

http://www.binatech.se/hem/Amps/first_dac_testfigures.html

Updated: optimized the pictures. Now we can see H2 at -83 dB. And H3 about -95 dB -> It is a harmonic profile that many people like, specially with recordings with few acoustic instruments and voices without much studio processing. -83 dB is a compromise between the -73 dB and -90 dB, to play all kinds of music.

TDA1541A with Burr Brown OP627 -0dB FFT

TDA1541A with Burr Brown OP627 -60dB FFT

 

[maty]

Totaldac d1-six, at 0 dBrA

 

[BillG]

You should remove this whole article, unless the aim was only to attack Totaldac.

He's no more attacked you and your products than he's done with any other product that's been analysed and reviewed here; Objective measurements from a lab grade analyzer aren't personal.

They are too many artifacts of different kinds.

That might be the first honest thing you've stated since joining the discussion...

 

[KSTR]

No, the results are the opposite and the unit actually implements a filter to correct the droop:
[... <pic> ...]
The dark line is the standard output which as a drop in high frequencies, not a peak as you state.

The correction filter is in red but it overshoots, rather than provide a flat response.

I also don't know what test you are describing. The source here is NOT a wideband signal, Farina or otherwise. A digital generator produces one tone at a time, and measures what is produced in the DAC. That better be accurate or all of your audio will be wrong. There is NO bandpass filter involved in this test. You are confusing how open-loop room measurement systems work with how a test instrument works to generate a close-loop frequency response.

Amir, I wrote about why we see an incorrect rise at HF for both curves while they show the (more or less) correct relationship to each other (the ZOH drop). It's the same type of measurement error that we sometimes see from measuring D/S-DACs with their strong rise of modulation noise above 20kHz which gives incorrect values for S/N and THD+N measurements wrt to what's actually relevant for perception. Or if you measure PWM amps and don't mask the influence of the carrier residual on the noise part.
Your new measurement looks better but I can tell you the only way to measure amplitude and phase response with great robustness is the Farina log sweep. I don't know how steep the bandlimit filter is in your AP model but I know it's not steep enough in my own personal 2322 and the 2722 which I have years of experience with (besides other analyzers, like DScopeII, R&S UPL/UPD, etc).

I'm not blaming you for making an error (we're all human and things happen), rather that you just took everything the AP spits out for real without questioning what you see when it seems to be too odd, before publishing. And yes, the THD+N vs frequency graph is completely off as well for the same reason

 

[FredYves]

BTW, how does Totaldac d1-six sound with complex music like the orchestral? Better or worse than with the RME?

Very good indeed. One of my favourite music is Mahler’s 5th Symphony, and I appreciate it a lot with TotalDac: the volume, the dynamics, the sense of space, the trumpets in the 1st movement. RME is good as well. Once again I will repeat that I prefer TotalDac with no intention to hurt anyone. The other thing I am conscious is that changing loudspeakers has more impact than changing DAC. Typically, I am less able to hear a difference between DAC with B&W 804D than with Vivid G3 (I am naming them because I can only build on something I have, and have listened to during hours).

 

[maty]

Off topic

About Mahler, maybe you are interested: Gustav Mahler - The Nine Symphonies - Georg Solti (1975), Vinyl x15, Decca, Germany

https://www.discogs.com/Gustav-Mahler-Georg-Solti-Die-Neun-Sinfonien/release/13703087

https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/mus...39254.html?s=1559756620cac9dff6ae5a12c2e1a826

 

[Joachim Herbert]

But remember that you can add effects to your music with any free DSP.

Got loads of VST plugins in jriver, namely ozone 8 by izotope or the outstanding TE-100, K&H tube equalizer emulation by Lindell.

You might think these are costly, but they are a steal compared to hardware generated distortion.

 

[BillG]

Got loads of VST plugins in jriver, namely ozone 8 by izotope

And I just happened to be discussing Analog Modeling software just a moment ago on here as well - that's the older Ozone MP plugin that was available for Winamp years back:

 

[JJB70]

Got loads of VST plugins in jriver, namely ozone 8 by izotope or the outstanding TE-100, K&H tube equalizer emulation by Lindell.

You might think these are costly, but they are a steal compared to hardware generated distortion.

But then I wouldn't be able to tell all my chums at the gentleman's club about my new 13,000 euro DAC and educate them on the evils of the accurate and transparent performance of Apple USB dongles costing the price of a sandwich.