DAC Noise Modulation: Chord DAVE vs Topping DX7 Pro+

[amirm]

If you happen to have elephants playing basketball in your living room, the Chord will more than likely survive. The Topping probably won't.

Pretty sure that display and buttons on Chord would be the first to go. The machined case on Topping is quite strong.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

If you happen to have elephants playing basketball in your living room, the Chord will more than likely survive. The Topping probably won't.

Good point. Where can I get one.

 

[flushingaudio]

Hi @amirm

Here is the latest post from golden sound on that other forum:

Looking at the results, I'm assuming Amir has the high-performance sine analyzer (notch filter) enabled, as he often leaves that on for other measurements like the J-Test.
This can influence the displayed noise floor and should not really be enabled for these sorts of tests.

This is why for example his J-Tests often have a curved shape around the fundamental. He doesn't have one of the DAVE, but here's one of the X18:

Notice the curve upwards between ~6khz and ~18khz

But when tested without the notch enabled:

No hump, and noise floor is shown correctly.

Amir does not publish his configurations so it's impossible to know how he had the analyzer configured, but if he did have the notch filter enabled for this test then it unfortunately renders it mostly invalid and would need to be repeated with it disabled to ensure it is not a contributing factor.

Here's my noise floor modulation test of the DAVE, which shows as @rob Watts 's own measurements did, no noise floor modulation:

As you can see, no noise floor modulation whatsoever. (Though neither I nor Amir achieved harmonics levels as low as Chord's own. Having said that, I do not have the notch enabled on that test (as explained above) so THD in this graph should be ignored. Look at the full measurements for that info)

Here's an X26 Pro for comparison:

Here we can see some increased noise as a result of higher output. Not much, but some.

Would you care to comment on all these measurements being published by ASR on these Chi-fi DACs and stating they are superior to Chord? Thanks.

I don't necessarily disagree with the measurements themselves (aside from the noise floor modulation one which as explained above I believe is due to his methodology. The notch filter should not be used in this test). His measurements largely align with my own ( https://goldensound.audio/2022/03/14/chord-dave-measurements-with-mscaler/ ) with some small differences which could easily be attributed to unit variation or difference in setup.

I do however disagree with the conclusion. Personally I feel SINAD alone is an insufficient metric to rank a DAC. It combines too many factors into one number and ignores too many others.

Does a D90SE have higher SINAD than a DAVE? Yes it does.
Does it sound better? No, in my opinion it does not.
Are there demonstrable reasons to explain this? Yes there are. Whether you choose to ignore them is upto you


Is he correct or is it just a lot of blah blah blah?

Thanks!

 

[DonR]

Got a reference for that? ;-)

Chord Electronics’ Hugo DAC Takes On A Tank… And Wins! - Essential Install

Find out what happens when Chord Electronics’ Hugo DAC takes on the might of a moving tank

essentialinstall.com

Seems to be a little overkill for a product that becomes obsolete after a few years, though.

 

[Jimbob54]

Chord Electronics’ Hugo DAC Takes On A Tank… And Wins! - Essential Install

Find out what happens when Chord Electronics’ Hugo DAC takes on the might of a moving tank

essentialinstall.com

Seems to be a little overkill for a product that becomes obsolete after a few years, though.

Well, my faith has been restored.

 

[DonDish]

If you happen to have elephants playing basketball in your living room, the Chord will more than likely survive. The Topping probably won't.

Elephants playing basketball in my living room. That reminds me of my wife with a vacuum cleaner. Maybe there is an incentive to buy this stuff anyway

 

[AaronJ]

Hi @amirm


Are there demonstrable reasons to explain this? Yes there are. Whether you choose to ignore them is upto you


Is he correct or is it just a lot of blah blah blah?

Thanks!

Does he list any of the demonstrable reasons? I'm not claiming he's incorrect or just blabbering on. But those claims need more context. It's a lot like claiming a component punches above its price point without listing any more expensive products that are inferior.

 

[amirm]

Hi @amirm

Here is the latest post from golden sound on that other forum:

Looking at the results, I'm assuming Amir has the high-performance sine analyzer (notch filter) enabled, as he often leaves that on for other measurements like the J-Test.
This can influence the displayed noise floor and should not really be enabled for these sorts of tests.

He is not understanding the nature of this analysis. I am trying to replicate both noise floor and distortion in Rob's posted measurement. Here is what Rob says above his posted graph: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/chord-electronics-dave.766517/page-10#post-11721177

"But around October 2014 AP launched the APX555, and this had a clever system to enable more accurate measurements of distortion and noise floor. What this instrument does is the employ two ADC's per channel, and an automatic notch filter, so one ADC uses notched out fundamental, and another ADC for the fundamental. The instrument then stitches the two plots together in the digital domain.

It also had a very high purity analogue oscillator - the system has residual THD at 2.5v of -150dB. Since I need a high purity analogue source to test the pro ADC project, and since Dave at that time exceeded the old AP measurement capacity, once AP launched the APX555 I went out and purchased one.

So we can now see the performance of Dave using the APX555:"

The bolded statement is the High Performance Sine Analyzer feature. If you don't enable it, the ADC in AP will create its own harmonic distortion, substantially corrupting the measurements of high-performance audio devices.

Here is the performance of DAVE with and without HP Sine Analyzer in AP:

As you see on the right, distortion spiked are now in -138 dB category -- far from -150 dB that Rob showed in his measurement:

Notice how there is a "skirt" under the 1 kHz tone in Rob's measurement, matching mine when using HP mode of the AP. So HP mode has to be used with the signal present. It then reasons that you don't change a thing in the measurement system other than turning off the signal. Which is what I did.

Here is the same measurement as above but with the two overlaid:

His beef with lack of parameters is non-sequitur. It is Rob's measurements that are so situated. I went out of my way to explain all the relevant parameters in my testing.

Conclusions
This test required using HP mode because that is what Rob used to make the claim of no noise floor modulation and ultra low distortion. Now, if he is saying Rob turned off the HP mode in his noise measurement, then that adds to the problem as Rob should have been very clear that the two measurements were performed differently.

Finally, both DACs were treated the same. It doesn't get more fair and proper than this.

 

[the_brunx]

Goldenboy has been repeatedly asked to comment on whether the Dave is objectively better sounding than the topping and he has avoided all such questions like the plague. It’s fun to watch. He won’t tell people the truth in front of Rob, and he also can’t lie because he knows we are watching. Lol quite entertaining this guy.
Edit, he finally did, unfortunately unproven answer.

 

[amirm]

But when tested without the notch enabled:

No hump, and noise floor is shown correctly.

As a side note, GS really needs to clean up his measurements. He is not using averaging so noise spikes take up large portion of bottom of the graph. This helps to hide distortion spikes and other spurious tones. All of them have this large "beard." As you see from Rob Watt's measurement, he too uses averaging, even more than I do likely to get those thin noise floor.

 

[Ken Tajalli]

Elephants playing basketball in my living room. That reminds me of my wife with a vacuum cleaner. Maybe there is an incentive to buy this stuff anyway

I just sent your post to your wife.
Rest in peace, we will miss you.

 

[amirm]

Goldenboy has been repeatedly asked to comment on whether the Dave is objectively better sounding than the topping and he has avoided all such questions like the plague. It’s fun to watch. He won’t tell people the truth in front of Rob, and he also can’t lie because he knows we are watching. Lol quite entertaining this guy.

He is another guy who has bought an analyzer as decoration. Topping clearly has lower noise and distortion but doesn't sound as good as DAVE?

 

[DonDish]

I just sent your post to your wife.
Rest in peace, we will miss you.

Im not sure what will save me more money, my wife leaving me or not having to buy a DAC that will survive the elephant test. Thnx for condolances anyway

 

[amirm]

With respect Amir, it's not off topic. You are reviewing and comparing a 7 year old Chord design with a brand new Topping product. The fact that you even can test that 7 year old product against the new Topping design speaks to the Chord's reliability wouldn't you say?

You say there are 'reliability issues reported' for Chord. What specific issues? Just how many dedicated threads and reports are there in relation 'reliability issues' with Chord products on ASR? I haven't seen one. Please point me a thread similar to the various long running thread/s for the 'other' brand we are not mentioning.

What's good for the goose is also good for the gander.

You are out of line John. This is not a general comparison of Chord against Topping. It is specific to measurements of noise floor.

You also have zero data to back what you said. We are not the destination site for anyone complaining about Chord products. Head-fi is. If you had bothered to do a simple search, you would landed on this post there:

The DAVE DAC is being sold today and claims of superior noise modulation was from last year. No excuses was made by the company that it is old. Instead, it was stated that it was the best there is with example of both noise floor and distortion. I simply grabbed the Topping DAC I had on hand and made a comparison. Please keep these other topics to yourself. They don't belong here or for that matter, elsewhere unless you have hard data to back them.

 

[DonR]

He is another guy who has bought an analyzer as decoration. Topping clearly has lower noise and distortion but doesn't sound as good as DAVE?

He may potentially be biased by the name on the cheque.

 

[flushingaudio]

He is not understanding the nature of this analysis. I am trying to replicate both noise floor and distortion in Rob's posted measurement. Here is what Rob says above his posted graph: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/chord-electronics-dave.766517/page-10#post-11721177

"But around October 2014 AP launched the APX555, and this had a clever system to enable more accurate measurements of distortion and noise floor. What this instrument does is the employ two ADC's per channel, and an automatic notch filter, so one ADC uses notched out fundamental, and another ADC for the fundamental. The instrument then stitches the two plots together in the digital domain.

It also had a very high purity analogue oscillator - the system has residual THD at 2.5v of -150dB. Since I need a high purity analogue source to test the pro ADC project, and since Dave at that time exceeded the old AP measurement capacity, once AP launched the APX555 I went out and purchased one.

So we can now see the performance of Dave using the APX555:"

The bolded statement is the High Performance Sine Analyzer feature. If you don't enable it, the ADC in AP will create its own harmonic distortion, substantially corrupting the measurements of high-performance audio devices.

Here is the performance of DAVE with and without HP Sine Analyzer in AP:

View attachment 229171

As you see on the right, distortion spiked are now in -138 dB category -- far from -150 dB that Rob showed in his measurement:

Notice how there is a "skirt" under the 1 kHz tone in Rob's measurement, matching mine when using HP mode of the AP. So HP mode has to be used with the signal present. It then reasons that you don't change a thing in the measurement system other than turning off the signal. Which is what I did.

Here is the same measurement as above but with the two overlaid:

View attachment 229173

His beef with lack of parameters is non-sequitur. It is Rob's measurements that are so situated. I went out of my way to explain all the relevant parameters in my testing.

Conclusions
This test required using HP mode because that is what Rob used to make the claim of no noise floor modulation and ultra low distortion. Now, if he is saying Rob turned off the HP mode in his noise measurement, then that adds to the problem as Rob should have been very clear that the two measurements were performed differently.

Finally, both DACs were treated the same. It doesn't get more fair and proper than this.

Thank you very much for your reply.
Do you mind if I repost your conclusion on the dark side?

 

[amirm]

Thank you very much for your reply.
Do you mind if I repost your conclusion on the dark side?

No, go ahead.

 

[diaolodoro]

When engineers and scientists disagree, there's often a great possibility of learning something new and improve a design. If ego or personal benefit gets in the way, the only thing that keeps things going is competition. It always does.

 

[tomchris]

Hi @amirm

Here is the latest post from golden sound on that other forum:

Looking at the results, I'm assuming Amir has the high-performance sine analyzer (notch filter) enabled, as he often leaves that on for other measurements like the J-Test.
This can influence the displayed noise floor and should not really be enabled for these sorts of tests.

Well, this is contradictory to what GoldenSound has said and shown is his own YouTube video at 8:21-9:30:

 

[Garrincha]

He is another guy who has bought an analyzer as decoration. Topping clearly has lower noise and distortion but doesn't sound as good as DAVE?

Sorry Amir, you still do not seem to get it, the DAVE may measure worse than the Dx7Pro+, but measurements aren´t everything, DACs aren´t just electronic devices, they are magical machines and the DAVE has simply more magic sauce, it is as simple as that.