Stereophile recently reviewed the "Weiss Engineering DAC502" DAC & headphone amp, I went straight to the price tag and saw $9850 and eagerly went to the measurements to see what a shit show it would be, but it actually is pretty good, not Mola Mola good, but good.
Here is a comparison with the Benchmark DAC 3 (Benchmark left, Weiss right).
Noise Floor (different scale)
50Hz THD
19+20kHz IMD
16Bit Jitter (USB)
24Bit Jitter (USB for Benchmark, AES for Weiss)
Ok, so it's good but not D90, Matrix, Mola Mola good, so why this post? Well, this thing has some impressive features not typically seen in 2ch products:
It also is Roon Ready.
What would be even cooler would be if it had true EQ like Dirac while preserving the loudness control feature.
While not a product I would ever even remotely consider for myself (not that I could even afford to spend $10K on a DAC ), it's nice to see a boutique manufacturer aiming for those with deep products that actually performs and has good features. I really pray this is a sign of the times.
Here is a comparison with the Benchmark DAC 3 (Benchmark left, Weiss right).
Noise Floor (different scale)
50Hz THD
19+20kHz IMD
16Bit Jitter (USB)
24Bit Jitter (USB for Benchmark, AES for Weiss)
Ok, so it's good but not D90, Matrix, Mola Mola good, so why this post? Well, this thing has some impressive features not typically seen in 2ch products:
- Room Equalizer - to suppress room modes for a decent bass reproduction.
- Creative Equalizer - a tone control with low boost/cut, high boost/cut and mid boost/cut. Very useful to correct those recordings which do not quite sound right.
- De-Essing - the automatic removal of overly bright sibilances from human voices. The sibilance effect can be more or less pronounced depending on your speakers or room acoustics.
- Constant Volume - adjusts the audio volume (loudness) to a constant value across all tracks played. Useful for "party mode" when the volume control should stay untouched.
- Vinyl Emulation - get that special sonic character of a record player based playback chain. We also employ an emulation of the DMM-CD procedure offered by the Stockfisch label.
- Crosstalk Cancelling (XTC) - for the playback of dummy head recordings or live recordings via speakers for an incredible live sensation. Dummy head recordings usually are listened to via headphones because they only work properly if the left channel goes to the left ear only and the right channel to the right ear only. With speakers this is difficult to achive as the left channel goes to the left and the right ear. But with some clever signal processing of the speaker channels is is possible to suppress the crosstalk, i.e. the audio going from the left speaker to the right ear and vice versa. If that works properly then the recording sounds as if one would be in the space where the recording has taken place. All the reverberation and 3D representation of the sound sources is there.(For speaker based playback only.)
- Loudness Control - a listening volume dependent equalization of the audio.
- Headphone Equalizer - to adapt any headphone to the listener's ears in terms of frequency response.
It also is Roon Ready.
What would be even cooler would be if it had true EQ like Dirac while preserving the loudness control feature.
While not a product I would ever even remotely consider for myself (not that I could even afford to spend $10K on a DAC ), it's nice to see a boutique manufacturer aiming for those with deep products that actually performs and has good features. I really pray this is a sign of the times.
Last edited: