Recent content by MBL'er

I do not know where do you live. From my perspective, also geographical, the need to ship the dac to China, at my expense for the whole turnaround, for any service has scared me out of Denafrips so far. Once I factored 300K Euros for insured roundtrip shipping. Actually, Denafrips "generous"...

When I had some exchanges with them on the Pegasus, it looked like they are a pure distributor. M

Last year I read an article in which the owner of the plant where Denafrips are manufactured reported to have outsourced some excess design / production capacity to a sort of "cousin company" named Musician Audio. Musician and Denafrips seem to share some overall design and components. The...

Unfortunately, on Denafrips Vinshine offers: no auditions (have to rely on hearsay or manipulative blokes on Ytube and blogs), no return policy, no local service, service under warranty only if customer pays shipping to China (expect 150K on each leg). Quite a difficult proposition, so to...

I never listened to the DX7, so I really cannot make any comment about that. When I tested the Pontus I vs my Topping D70S (level matched, both blind and sighted), the Pontus made a very poor show in every department: recessed and "cavernous" voices, weak bass, lack of details and engagement...

Actually I wrote "at least" 1/10. As I said, I am no technician, I just listen to music through hi fi gear. If you would like to get more into that, please pm me your email address and I will put you in contact with a tube amp designer I sometimes co-operate with - NY born so you will not have...

Likely.

"in theory" does not mean that there is a formal theory, but rathe "it should be like that" Please do not get that literal path, I teached for 13 years business strategy and corporate finance at the Rome University ...

I have a friend who designs and manufactures tube amps. I got the info on impedance mismatch effects from him. From what I understand on R2R designs, also having read some articles on Soekris site, it seems that the resistors rails have "voltage output", so they do not need the I/V stage. By...

You are correct, best match is through unbalanced. In theory, to perfectly match the Ares II the pre should have at least 24,000 Ohm on balanced input and 12,000 Ohm on unbalanced. M

In theory yes, as the preamp input impedance should be at least 10x the dac output impedance, or the bass performance deteriorates (as told by my friend amp designer). In personal practice, I connected the Musician Pegasus (same output impedance as the Ares II) to my preamp trying both the 50K...

Do you know the input impedance of the Pre D90 ?

That could also be. The Pegasus in NOS mode sounded compressed on the top end and muddy in anywhere else.

I really do not know first hand. A friend of mine, deep in electronics, told me that R2R dacs can have sample to sample differences in the resistor rails. Based on measurements, in the audible zone both the D70S and the Pegasus should sound the same. But, then, the Pegasus somewhat smoothes...

I had for almost two months both the D70S (my currently "resident" dac) and the Musician Pegasus, a close cousin of the Ares (but not identical). In my 2 channel system they did not sound the same. Not even closely. Blind, sighted, level matched, with "audio friends", with my "industry guy"...