Bricasti M1SE Stereo DAC Review

[MacClintock]

It is nice to see properly working reconstruction filters, even Rob "'300 dB is audible" Watts would like them, he would propbably also like the price, competing with the Dave. But other than that it seems like a piece of gear from another era, pre available measurements, golden ear, expensive sounds better hifi era. Luckily long ago.

 

[JSmith]

costs US $10,000

It is on kind loan from a member

Good to see members sending in items for testing, so thanks to this member and to you Amir for testing all those filters. Hey, at least the filter selection works in this product.


JSmith

 

[Redman43]

I choose Topping D30 and could buy about 99 of those for this price. Keep 1 for myself and hand out rest of them outside of a subway entrance...You know for shits and giggles
My eternal respect to ANY company that can and does separate fools from their money. No irony, I truly mean that. Voted poor, for this price it needs to be SOTA and be able to do my laundry, run errands and replace me at my job 3 days a week so I can go fishing.

 

[Highvolt60]

Linearity leaves a bit to be desired, but more importantly it looks like they didn't do a full set of measurements both with and without oversampling. If you're not using oversampling, I imagine there might be an audible difference which would explain your preference in blind testing. The Gustard A26 is of course the best performing DAC out of these objectively.

The oversampling they refer to on the BDA-1 is really upsampling. There is no NOS mode !
The upsampling is for multiples of 44.1k or 48k rates upsampled to 176.4k or 192k.
I never used it and does not sound any better !

 

[Dialectic]

Why is Bricasti using a decade-old Analog Devices chip in this DAC?

A decade ago, it was their top of the line if memory serves.

These days, stiff competition from the likes of ESS, AKM, Crystal, etc.

Did they buy a snarfload of them initially and now they're stuck with them?

Almost certainly.

I'm waiting to hear someone argue that the old chips sound better than the new chips because of some unmeasurable je ne sais quoi.

 

[Rhamnetin]

Almost certainly.

I'm waiting to hear someone argue that the old chips sound better than the new chips because of some unmeasurable je ne sais quoi.

I've seen this claim on other forums and Discord servers. There's never any data to back it up though.

 

[GWolfman]

I demand overtime pay for having had to measure them!

I’ll quadruple your pay, no wait, I’ll give you an order of magnitude. $0 * 10 = $0. Don’t spend it all one place!

Joking aside, thanks for another review!

 

[restorer-john]

I agree with Amir, it looks classy and has stood the test of time well.

 

[TonyJZX]

I agree with Amir, it looks classy and has stood the test of time well.

Bricasti Design

Bricasti Design, the world's premier manufacturer of hand crafted, great sounding, easy to use, digital reverbs.

www.bricasti.com

tbf its a box... with the red led display from some Chinese odm... and you are buying into their 'made in usa' delusion in that you beleive that the ADI1955 can compete with the current SOTA

these things are at least 10yrs old in design... the above box have morphed into a Series II and price has gone up

I'm pretty sure uncle paul from PS audio also believes in 'classic' DAC chip 'aura' but he's at the sub $5k mark

 

[Mnyb]

Ok for the vintage of the DAC chips they where probably old 12 yesrs ago . Kudos for implenting good filters . Too expensive not competitive ( whos the market for this ).

I see one strange thing in the filter measurements there is a wide slope from 5k to 20k at about 0,5dB ? Never seen that before ?
Its not much in level but its very very wide ? Potentially audible ? Sounds a tiny bit nicer ?

I do prefer tone control i can actually control ?

 

[Yasuo]

No! And I'm not sorry to be blunt... for 10K I can buy a whole audio setup, from source/streamer/player, DAC, amplifier, headphones and speakers that measure better than this.

As always, thanks for the review Amir!

 

[Mnyb]

Who changes DAC all the time i sold my 20 year old Meridian processor the other day so its about time i supose

 

[DHT 845]

Alas, we can buy this level of performance for less than 5% of the cost of Bricasti! You won't get the distinctive and nice look of Bricasti. Only you can decide if you want to pay 95% more for that.

If A costs 5% of the price of B, then you have to pay 1900% more for B (not 95% more). Science...

 

[amirm]

If A costs 5% of the price of B, then you have to pay 1900% more for B (not 95% more). Science...

If the cost is 100 and one product is $5, then the rest is $95.

 

[DHT 845]

If the cost is 100 and one product is $5, then the rest is $95.

let's make it 20 times more

 

[Endibol]

Poor value for sure. I've never spent $10K on any single piece of audio gear.

I once did, but I regret it now..

 

[YSC]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Bricasti Audio M1SE balanced stereo DAC. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $10,000:
View attachment 354404
The indication says M1 but owner tells me it has the "SE" upgrade. I have been a fan of the industrial design of Bricasti audio products since I first saw them. They remind me of Mark Levinson designs (I believe the industrial designer is the same). While a bit old fashioned with that dot matrix display, it still screams "high-end" to me. The interface is easy to navigate by pushing a button and then selecting things.

The box itself is very heavy and dense. It has an independent linear power supply for each channel which likely is responsible for much of that. It uses an Analog Devices DAC combined with external filtering.

Here is the back panel:
View attachment 354405
Nice to see S/PDIF provided both as RCA and BNC.

Bricasti M1 SE DAC Measurements
Let's start with our usual dashboard using XLR output:
View attachment 354406
I would have liked to see the output level be 4 volts. Manual says there is an internal jumper that causes the output to be variable and then you can set it to a higher value. But why is the default this odd number? I looked the AD DAC they are using and it has a SINAD of 110 dB so they are short a bit in that front. Still what I measured perfectly matches company specifications and lands the DAC in our competent category:
View attachment 354407

View attachment 354408

RCA output is a bit worse as is typically the case:

View attachment 354410

The issue here is high level of distortion as noise performance is excellent:View attachment 354412

They could do better though as indicated by our IMD level sweep:
View attachment 354414
Linearity test shows power supply noise lowering accuracy at very low signal levels:
View attachment 354415

Jitter performance is very good, albeit with a couple of spikes that should not be there:
View attachment 354416

Multitone test results are better than I expected in critical audio bands (1 to 5 kHz):
View attachment 354417

One channel is worse than the other in the dashboard and we see the same here with 50 Hz stereophile test:
View attachment 354418

There are crazy number of filters here. I demand overtime pay for having had to measure them!
View attachment 354419
View attachment 354420

The implementation is the best I have seen for minimum phase where there is essentially no ripple or early roll off:
View attachment 354421

And you have multiple choices in linear filters as well to get the best attenuation and widest bandwidth:View attachment 354422

The filters are so good that the recommended ones above didn't make a difference in our wideband THD+N test:
View attachment 354424
Alas, we have rising distortion with frequency. Even at lower frequencies, a high-end DAC should do much better.

Conclusions
Many times when I measure a high-end DAC, it lacks measurements. And almost in all cases we wind up with poor measured performance as well. Not so here. The company specifications are very accurate and speak the truth. And that truth lands the M1SE in the category of "competent." Alas, we can buy this level of performance for less than 5% of the cost of Bricasti! You won't get the distinctive and nice look of Bricasti. Only you can decide if you want to pay 95% more for that.

I should note that I think they are being held back by their choice of DAC silicon. The rest of the design seems better than what that chip allows.

I personally can't recommend the Bricasti M1 SE. It is too much money for the level of performance, despite how much I like its looks. But if you have one, you can take comfort in knowing you got what the company promised. And audible performance should be good enough.

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

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It looks quite good in performance, alas I read the price after the conclusion.... in such price bracket I believe ppl are paying 95% for things other than sheer performance, it's objectively transparent enough, maybe it's look, brand reputation and reliability/customer service that could make the buyer pay for it.

And seriously, when a customer is willing to pay 10k for a transparent dac, that money shouldn't be any issue to him/her, and the rare high end branding causing psycholigical satisfication or the price for showing off could weight much more, us poor layman won't afford one even if it get 256 db SINAD anyway

 

[Mart68]

I just vote on performance and appearance, not price. So gave top marks as it looks good.

The do a gold version which is so crazy I want one:

 

[YSC]

I once did, but I regret it now..

man, no need to regret, at least it proves you have a lot more disposal income,

 

[DHT 845]

I just vote on performance and appearance, not price. So gave top marks as it looks good.

The do a gold version which is so crazy I want one:

Are you serious? It looks awfull in gold.
If you want nice gold DAC go for EAD DSP Pro 9000...