Congratulations on getting PussyGalore into the discussion.Nothing wrong with the 50s and 60s for style and performance...
Grace Kelly
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Honor Blackman
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Tania Mallet
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I have an SMSL SU-8 which has RCA Out, are there any amps with rca in to amplify
And even if there weren't, you just use an RCA to 3.5mm cable, which are cheap and readily available. If you just need a good amp at a good price to go with your SMSL, I'd get a JDS Atom and be done with it.There are plenty of great headphone amps with RCA inputs.
That would be for a future project to evaluate such differences. For now, by the time you pay for US $240 for HQPlayer, you might as well buy a much more performant DAC and not need a powerful PC for HQPlayer to boot.Miska, developer of HQPlayer has measured some of the iFi products - they all do substantially better in DSD mode. Any chance you could run the measurements using HQPlayer with DSD 256, the trial version would work.
The firmware you mean? 5.3 is the default one yeah so that employs the default TI filter which Amir measured here.
The 5.3C version uses the GTO filter instead.
It is quite awkward to need firmware updates to change the filter, but I understand its because they are using the XMOS chip to implement the GTO filter so no way to get around it.
They do also offer custom XMOS drivers on their website which I would recommend over the default windows ones too. They give you a control panel that allows you to chose the USB streaming latency. For some reason it defaults to safe rather than standard. Not sure if that impacts the measurements or not, but as I understand it the lower latency should in theory give less jitter though you have to be careful not to go too low or it causes drop outs. I set it for low latency and havent had any issues with dropouts so just left it on that.
haven't triedDid you lose the color change for various files after flashing?
I make a judgement call on sequence of gear that I test. New gear often gets priority due to the fact that it impacts many people who are waiting to purchase them or not.I'm quite sad you bought this product just last week considering there is other gear sent to you that hasn't been tested yet.
It's your own time though so my opinion hopefully doesn't hurt you.
That would be for a future project to evaluate such differences. For now, by the time you pay for US $240 for HQPlayer, you might as well buy a much more performant DAC and not need a powerful PC for HQPlayer to boot.
Did you lose the color change for various files after flashing?
Holo Cyan/Spring still measure best as R2Rs. iFi's choice of DSD1793 chip does not seem to be capable of better than 96dB SINAD best-case. Not exactly spectacular...Yeah if your using GTO you will lose that as well as the "bit perfect" aspect of the dac. It always shows as MQA because its basically doing some sort of strange conversion of all your music into MQA. One of the reasons I am a bit suspicious of it lol.
The whole logic behind the use of the Burr-Brown chipset IFI uses is that it is a hybrid of delta-sigma and multibit that is able to process both DSD and PCM without any kind of conversion. idea being you will get both the "multibit magic" as well as the higher end delta-sigma performance. And as measurements show it does indeed outperform a straight multibit dac.
Holo Cyan/Spring still measure best as R2Rs. iFi's choice of DSD1793 chip does not seem to be capable of better than 96dB SINAD best-case. Not exactly spectacular...
I have to agree, it's not all about measurements. And alot of the measurements on audioscience are hinting that one unit is better than another, and thats below human threshold,l understand that audioscience is mainly about measurements.Ifi apparently tested as many chips as they could before choosing the DSD1793. They say they believe it sounds equally as good with both PCM and DSD, where other chips do sound better than the 1793 with one of those formats but worse with the other, so it made sense.
Now I know their opinion on what sounds good may not mean anything to those who rely solely on measurements, but some designers do design with their ears as much as with scopes. The chips they use are not cheap, and they have pushed those chips way beyond what the data sheets say they are capable of (higher sample rates etc) so I’m sure it would be easier for them to use more modern chips that would instantly measure a lot better without much effort.
I’m not trying to say that I don’t care about measurements, I do, not an I saying Ifi’s methodology correct or not, but I do believe they do have some good tech know how, so I’m sure when they do decide to make a DAC with a 9038 or something, they will do a job that will impress with measurements.
l understand that audioscience is mainly about measurements.