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Audio-gd Master 7 Singularity Review (DAC)

Johannes AU

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But it has all the prerequisites for an Audiophile piece of equipment.....Heavy, Expensive, Blue Light and a cult-following at Head-Fi.

Even with all the poor measurements, it must sound fantastic:cool:


Yes, plus Wisdom in mind, enthusiasm at heart. :p
 

milosz

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I have owned a few audio-Gd products, in fact I sent Amirm a DAC and a DAC/amp to test, and the results were miserable. Their build quality is kind of over-the-top which I thought would result in good sound. It does not.

By the way, there is such a thing as a "Class A voltage regulator" but it is usually not named that way; the more common electrical engineering term is SHUNT REGULATOR. They offer low source impedance, good regulation and make lots of heat.

Audio-Gd pays a lot of attention to power supplies. Their power supplies are quite good. Unfortunately, the rest of the circuitry and firmware leaves much to be desired as we can see from Amirm's analysis.

As I have said before, I would like to see a blind listening test to see how readily we can hear the difference between something like one of these "broken" designs and a decent design like the various nice Topping DACs. I think we would be surprised at the results of such a study. While it is my belief that some people could hear the difference, I don't think many of us audio hobbyists are nearly as good at hearing as we like to think.

This DAC is typical of Audio-Gd products, it seems to me. People buy their gear and report being happy with it. Surely if typical users were able to readily hear the flaws in these products, they wouldn't sell very many. But Audio-Gd enjoys fairly robust sales- and this makes me think that many people can't hear these flaws.
 

Mike2fr

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I have owned a few audio-Gd products, in fact I sent Amirm a DAC and a DAC/amp to test, and the results were miserable. Their build quality is kind of over-the-top which I thought would result in good sound. It does not.

By the way, there is such a thing as a "Class A voltage regulator" but it is usually not named that way; the more common electrical engineering term is SHUNT REGULATOR. They offer low source impedance, good regulation and make lots of heat.

Audio-Gd pays a lot of attention to power supplies. Their power supplies are quite good. Unfortunately, the rest of the circuitry and firmware leaves much to be desired as we can see from Amirm's analysis.

As I have said before, I would like to see a blind listening test to see how readily we can hear the difference between something like one of these "broken" designs and a decent design like the various nice Topping DACs. I think we would be surprised at the results of such a study. While it is my belief that some people could hear the difference, I don't think many of us audio hobbyists are nearly as good at hearing as we like to think.

This DAC is typical of Audio-Gd products, it seems to me. People buy their gear and report being happy with it. Surely if typical users were able to readily hear the flaws in these products, they wouldn't sell very many. But Audio-Gd enjoys fairly robust sales- and this makes me think that many people can't hear these flaws.

I am the owner of this fine piece of singularity.... I compared it with a Topping D90SE

On My focal Shape 65/Preamp Schiit Freya it took me seconds to figure it out.

Yes it was not blind but I went back and forth because I could not believe it.

The difference is massive and extremely obvious.

But hey if you want it, it is for sale
 

aj625

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I have owned a few audio-Gd products, in fact I sent Amirm a DAC and a DAC/amp to test, and the results were miserable. Their build quality is kind of over-the-top which I thought would result in good sound. It does not.

By the way, there is such a thing as a "Class A voltage regulator" but it is usually not named that way; the more common electrical engineering term is SHUNT REGULATOR. They offer low source impedance, good regulation and make lots of heat.

Audio-Gd pays a lot of attention to power supplies. Their power supplies are quite good. Unfortunately, the rest of the circuitry and firmware leaves much to be desired as we can see from Amirm's analysis.

As I have said before, I would like to see a blind listening test to see how readily we can hear the difference between something like one of these "broken" designs and a decent design like the various nice Topping DACs. I think we would be surprised at the results of such a study. While it is my belief that some people could hear the difference, I don't think many of us audio hobbyists are nearly as good at hearing as we like to think.

This DAC is typical of Audio-Gd products, it seems to me. People buy their gear and report being happy with it. Surely if typical users were able to readily hear the flaws in these products, they wouldn't sell very many. But Audio-Gd enjoys fairly robust sales- and this makes me think that many people can't hear these flaws.
Exactly, most people hear what others wanted them to hear. This audiophile hobby has been driven by mostly subjective opinions over the last many years. Many big brands deliberately plant goody goody subjective reviews through so called reputed review forums. These reviews mostly are nothing more than permutations and combinations of few audiophile jargon words. But since past few years asr has shifted this towards more of an objective approach. Many people like us eagerly wait for asr reviews. Many brands have even changed their approach of designing the products based on these asr reviews, schiit being one of them. But I still think there is long way to go. More and more products you send to asr for measurements, better will be the chances of design improvement in future products.
 

preload

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Their whole idea of using through-hole discrete components to replace opamps is pretty good marketing. I almost fell for it a long time ago before my EE friend explained that the concept was completely idiotic, since the component tolerances inside an opamp were orders of magnitude tighter than that which could be achieved with discrete components.

I guess this is one of the (several) ways audiogd tries to achieve market separation in a crowded market.
 

GXAlan

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Ha. The Denon DA-500 for RCA out handily beats this one if you think R2R imparts a pleasant sound in its distortion profile.
 

preload

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Dunno about you all but I find it strangely entertaining to read reviews where Amir reports abysmal measurements from an ultra-expensive solid state component. I'm started to get bored of the Topping reviews with the -150dB or whatever SINAD.
 

Victoria

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@amirm needs a panther that is just a pile of broken, pink ceramic shards to classify devices that are overly-engineered with such stunningly poor performance. The headless panther just doesn't cut it in a case like this.

Based. @amirm please do this. The designer of this product frankly needs to be banished for committing crimes against mother nature. This is absolutely unforgivable; what the hell are all those components even used for? Such a bloody waste of resources just to eventually end up in a landfill when a phone dongle with its significantly lower carbon footprint does better in every conceivable metric. And no I’m not a treehugger, this is just pure insanity.
 

YSC

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When his calender of the whole year marks April 1st, such schematics were being drawn.....
Well actually I bet it’s more simple…

To make a module, no feedback no measurement, then when resistor and caps needed just flood it with 3x the needed amount and with ultra good parts with renowned performance, then copy and paste it to make it symmetrical and looks good..
 

respice finem

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This is a review and detailed measurements of the Audio-gd Master 7 Singularity DAC. It is on kind loan from a member. Can't quite find the cost for it but seems to have sold for $2,500 or so when it came out in 2018 (?).

I must say, this is one of the heavies DACs I have measured:

View attachment 152201

If you are paying for weight, you are certainly getting your money's worth! I was surprised that there is no volume control on the unit. The only control is to select one of 6 different inputs:

View attachment 152202

I get a kick out of the tape (upper left) that is supposed to tell them if you opened the unit because to change its settings, you have to change jumpers inside!!! Speaking of inside, here is a shot of it:

View attachment 152203

There no jumpers set in there but I can't figure out from their "manual" what that means. The English is quite poor. Owner had not modified it and I tested it as is. Company says after "May 15" settings are one way versus before. Problem is, it doesn't say which year!

Speaking of the manual, it starts this way:
View attachment 152204

Unbelievable.

Audio-gd Master 7 Singularity
Man, this DAC was an adventure to measure. I started with USB input whose jack is kind of crooked in the back. The clock in the dashboard was jumping back and forth every few seconds so I plotted the frequency by itself and got this:

View attachment 152205

So every two seconds or so, it jumps precisely from 1 kHz to 0.9993 kHz! Clearly there is a bug in the clock locking algorithm here. Fortunately it doesn't happen with the other two inputs (Toslink and Coax) which I tested. Because of the disturbance, I could not filter the FFT for USB so it looks more fuzzy than it would be otherwise:

View attachment 152206

Nominal output is around 5.3 volts or so. To make the comparison more fair I brought that back down to level you see with -2 dB attenuation on the input (it doesn't change the results hardly at all). We see that there are some 8 dB difference in distortion between one and the other channel. Averaging the two SINADs we get 85 dB which puts the Master 7 squarely in the poor category of all DACs tested:
View attachment 152210

Zooming in you can see its competitors better:

View attachment 152211

Two notches higher is the Google phone dongle!

Back to our dashboard, this is what you get when you switch to Coax and Toslink:

View attachment 152212

View attachment 152214

So much garbage and variability.

Moving on to dynamic range we get another poor result although not as bad as distortion:
View attachment 152215


I went testing IMD and for kicks, I also measured RCA out in addition to balanced which was used above:

View attachment 152216

The balanced output is not much better than a phone dongle but what on earth is going on with RCA out in green? So I went back and ran the dashboard with RCA Out:
View attachment 152217

What on earth are you doing here Audio-gd? Why produce so much more distortion with RCA as opposed to balanced?

Jitter test shows distinct difference between USB and coax+toslink:

View attachment 152218

So much for fancy PLL implemented in FPGA and such.

Considering what we have seen so far, Multitone results were much more decent:
View attachment 152219

Since the output is higher than 4 volts, let's sweep it to find the sweet spot:

View attachment 152220

Oh come on now, what is with that ditch at 1.5 volt? This curve should smoothly climb up and then maybe drop a little. It should never have this kind of nonlinearity.

Speaking of non-linearity, let's run our linearity test:

View attachment 152221

Notice how the level shifts as you get to some amplitude with a constant error. There is some kind of design problem here.

Filter in the output stage is quite slow (and hence wrong):
View attachment 152222

This is partially responsible for poor response in our THD+N versus frequency which uses wideband measurements:

View attachment 152223

The total noise and distortion literally jumps out of the chart above 500 Hz! Switching to 192 kHz sampling eliminated the effect of the slow filter (green and brown). Sadly performance is still quite poor and gets worse with frequency above 1 kHz. In that regard, our dashboard which also runs at 1 kHz is showing the best case response, not the worst.

Conclusions
Some of the earliest DACs I tested were from Audio-gd. Results were not only poor but different than what company advertised. This DAC was kind sent to me to see if their newer products do better. Sadly they do not. The Master 7 Singularity has a suite of problems in many areas. Clearly it has not benefited from proper design verification and optimization. Tons of parts are thrown at the problem which look good on paper and website but perform very poorly. Performance is simply unacceptable at any price let alone what they charge.

Needless to say, I cannot recommend the Audio-gd Master 7 Singularity.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

Exactly my perception of so called "high end", a graveyard of parts, dubious design, even more dubious claims...
Thank you for showing the reality of such products to the world.
 
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