Amir says this referring to the filter in his review: 'The latter is something few companies get right. Good thing as there is no way to change the filter.' I admit I don't understand that statement, since as I understand it the filters are hard-coded on the actual ESS chip, so I'm not quite sure why it would be a problem 'to get it right'. I'm sure I'm missing something, maybe you could explain?
Topping E50 is a lot better value in my opinion.
Topping E50 Review (Balanced DAC)
This is a review and detailed measurements of the new Topping E50 balanced USB DAC. It was sent to me by the company and costs US $269. I just reviewed its companion headphone amplifier, the Topping L50. The E50 takes my favorite orange LED display and makes it even nicer! It is a gorgeous...
The cheapest Topping product reviewed by Amir with balanced output and brick wall filter seems to be the EX5 at $349. Neither the D10 Balanced ($139) nor the E50 ($269) allow you to select that filter even though they have Sabre DACs, from what I can tell (all prices from Amir's reviews). With the EX5 you get slightly better DAC performance and an excellent headphone amplifier for only $50 more, so it seems like a way better deal in the vast majority of cases. But if you don't want the USB input and the headphone amplifier for whatever reason, the extra $100 is hard to justify.
I understand balanced output is a plus (if the amp has balanced input...), but what is exactly the magic of brick wall lpf, hitting the 20khz as close as possible and then falling as straight as possible down to the noise floor?
The least expensive balanced DAC (without requiring an XLR adapter) with the minimum acceptable performance currently available is the SMSL DO100 - this is indeed an accomplishment by SMSL.
I think the company name 'Geshelli' is derived from the husband/wife couple who run the company, 'Geno/Sherri', hence 'Ge-Shelli' - someone correct me please if I'm wrong.
Agree... Chinese may leave a small niche market for loudspeakers (because imho they have no idea about loudspeakers, or have different ears...), but for the rest they are absolute Mambo Kings...
I agree but they are allowing for customization and enclosure selections that high volume Chinese companies probably would never do. That is the way to compete in this environment, and they also care about performance as shown in the testing. I just think there are some rough edges that may hold them back from maximum success.
Just unconfirmed rumors but I've heard that there are many great loudspeakers that are sold domestically in China, they don't carry the same price/performance sense though.
Yeah there's what you said and also great customer service and the feeling of supporting a small, "indie" company like Geshelli. Their marketing is also quite nice imo as they do try to capture the balance between objective performance and subjective sentimentalism that both audiophiles and musicians love.
With a slow reconstruction filter, the DAC will output a mirror version of your signal as ultrasonic garbage. This can cause a multitude of complications that might end up affecting the audible frequencies. And from a more philosophical point of view, having the DAC output a bunch of ultrasonic crap on top of the input signal is not really acceptable when we're chasing 120 dB SINAD perfection.I understand balanced output is a plus (if the amp has balanced input...), but what is exactly the magic of brick wall lpf, hitting the 20khz as close as possible and then falling as straight as possible down to the noise floor?
Imho, the slow filter of my Topping E30 ( AKM based) is my favorite one (upsampling everything at the max 705.6/768khz with squeezelite)...
Yes i know the theory thanks... ButWith a slow reconstruction filter, the DAC will output a mirror version of your signal as ultrasonic garbage. This can cause a multitude of complications that might end up affecting the audible frequencies. And from a more philosophical point of view, having the DAC output a bunch of ultrasonic crap on top of the input signal is not really acceptable when we're chasing 120 dB SINAD perfection.
However, your upsampling process is most likely already applying a brick wall filter to the signal at 20 kHz, and a pre-filtered signal with a high sampling frequency makes the work of the DAC reconstruction filter really easy, so the slow filter is probably enough to avoid any ultrasonics. I see that the slow filter in the E30 attenuates the signal a few dB in the audible frequency range, could be that this is what you hear and prefer, although my money's on placebo (no offense, we're all but humble servants of the mighty placebo god).
These graphs show curves based at 44.1khz sampling freq because this is common CD standard. But if the sampling freq is moved one, two, four, etc... octaves higher, and lpf/anti aliasing filters are applied also one, two, four, etc ...octaves higher, so that bandwith is increased proportionally and you have no longer to worry about spurious aliasing effects in the audio band...With a slow reconstruction filter, the DAC will output a mirror version of your signal as ultrasonic garbage. This can cause a multitude of complications that might end up affecting the audible frequencies. And from a more philosophical point of view, having the DAC output a bunch of ultrasonic crap on top of the input signal is not really acceptable when we're chasing 120 dB SINAD perfection.
However, your upsampling process is most likely already applying a brick wall filter to the signal at 20 kHz, and a pre-filtered signal with a high sampling frequency makes the work of the DAC reconstruction filter really easy, so the slow filter is probably enough to avoid any ultrasonics. I see that the slow filter in the E30 attenuates the signal a few dB in the audible frequency range, could be that this is what you hear and prefer, although my money's on placebo (no offense, we're all but humble servants of the mighty placebo god).
I was not asking, just rising a question...
No, that's what i said...
Completely irrelevant. The number one search result on Google is a dead link. How many others are, also? This is easy to find and fix. I routinely run such checks for clients as part of their monthly maintenance. So should any other dev/web manager.
