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I went back now and had a look at the other designs. The really awful one looked more like there was a problem with the device. It's got crazy high levels of all distortion orders. This usually happens when something is vibrating or hasn't been sealed properly. Like the interface between the...

Ah I didn't realise they were using soft domes as well. I didn't have the time to load up every link just to check. It is a limit of compression driver technology though. Much the same as a limit with tweeters that have wide surrounds. They have inherently high levels of 2nd order harmonic...

This is a characteristic of compression drivers. If you notice it's pretty much all 2nd order distortion and nothing else. Classic compression driver distortion profile as you get lower. The upside is that there's very little distortion of any other order. 2nd order is known to be pretty...

I don't really see why this doesn't get a recommendation. The DAC output is there for you to monitor yourself, via headphones, when using a microphone. It doesn't need to be of any quality really except to work and it does that fine. The ADC side of things is obviously meant for recording a...

Yes it should be absolutely noted that any dielectric, other than NP0/C0G, is not suitable for a position in the signal path, especially around the corner frequency of the filter they are making. Of course there are othe sources of 3rd order, and then other odd order harmonics, in audio...

Thanks :)

At what spl were the distortion measurements taken at if you can remember!

It reaches further over than just one trace. In the single ended version it's just going to be a mess and that's clearly visible in the measurements here. All those channels routed in a tiny space with them all converging at the pot. No doubt channel 1 influences all the other 7 channels to...

Of course it does. If you get an identical induced signal on both the hot and cold it'll be rejected. Likewise if all your internal signals are running as differential pairs on tightly routed parallel trace sets then not only will each differential pair reject any common mode signal that's...

This device was measured to have poor crosstalk. This is signal contamination which a fully balanced internal signal path would reject. It's reasonable to assume that the channel to channel signal injection is occurring at the points on the PCB where the single ended lines run close to one...

How educational. I can understand not wanting to attenuate balanced with standard potentiometers. Given their channel mismatch you'd destroy the rejection ratio of the balanced line. But when using volume control chips with good inter-channel balance? This unit would have better performance...

Why?

By the looks of things this isn't a fully balanced design. It takes the differential inputs, converts them to single ended, does the volume control stuff, then sends the signal back through a single ended to differential line driver. What a disaster. No wonder the channel separation is terrible...

Also this DAC is customisable to use different DAC chips too so it would be nice to know which one this is. And now that Amir has found the manual maybe retesting is necessary to see what SINAD can be achieved using different gain settings.

To be fair it only uses a tiny 3" full range driver. If all you want to do is listen at low volume, and have a really small room, it'll do fine. If your definition of hifi requires the ability to go loud and have lots of bass then that will create a skew against speakers like this and it's...

The resonance is at 1.9kHz. Stereophile show clear metal cone breakup at a little over 5kHz. Distortion peak is third order. Not much more needs to be said about where it comes from.

This isn't exactly true the main designer of the Nautilus left B&W and made Vivid Audio. As far as I understood he did this because B&W started to move in a 'we like audiophool design approaches' direction and he didn't.

There's no reason why floor standers wouldn't work in that space either. The important thing is if they've been designed more for close rear wall placement or not. This has nothing to do with the size of the speaker and everything to do with the design. For what it's worth lots of active...

I wasn't considering that B&W would do something like that but from the measurements we can see that the tweeter starts to take over below 2Khz. Obviously this is a good design decision, for off axis performance, which is why this has decent directivity and can be EQ'd so nicely. B&W haven't...

I think you've misread what Amir wrote. This is what he wrote. Which says two things. 1) An included phone charger needs to be used to power the unit over USB-C. 2) It did not work when I used my computer USB port. Where did Amir say the phone charger didn't work?