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Looking for Desktop DAC/Amp

Veri

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If you want to take some serious measurements please be sure it has speedball upgrade.
Yeah, the stock would likely have amir fall of his chair lol :)

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I doubt we'll see another tube-stage doing as good as the Schiit Saga honestly, which did really exemplary all things considered.
 

tired_guru

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Yeah, the stock would likely have amir fall of his chair lol :)

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I doubt we'll see another tube-stage doing as good as the Schiit Saga honestly, which did really exemplary all things considered.

Tubes are not for measurements crown :) They are just for relaxing, drifting away late at night having a look at mesh rectifier tube glowing or output tubes heaters, enjoying even order distortion making sound "wet", saturated, smooth and organic but big, weighty and punchy. Phase shifts probably create depth & diffused image of musical performance. This is big step aside from neutrality or hi-fi. But sometimes I simply prefer to listen to some nice tube amp like Woo6 with HD600 instead of having A+ results in synthetic benchmarks. Even though it is using DC heating, great grounding / signal path proper routing and transformers screening to avoid crappy humming/buzzing, it will never measure as good as nice solid state, but this is not the point.

Anyway, speedball should raise a bar a bit.

You want quite nice measurement from tube headamp (not hybrid) ? I would bet DC heating Valhalla 2 (2 gain modes checked, schiit usually uses some local nfb in one of the gains, so that would even make the measurements better). Very neutral, analitycal sounding amp. There is no sign of classical tube amp sound signature though for me.
 
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tired_guru

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I live in Finland. It cost a fortune:eek:

Woo6 is one of the cheapest. And I prefered it to Wa3, Wa6SE and Wa2 with something like HD600. It is quite special because it is with output transformer - very rare because it raises the price quite nice. But the subjective effect was immediate comparing to OTL designs for me (OTL sounds quite neutral, more SS like for me). Amazing punch, weight, big depth, epic organic, thick sound signature. Having audio transformer on output has advantage of low output impedance. Woo used impedance selector for low impedance headphones & high impedance. Another big advantage is that this is the safest type of tube amp for your headphones because there is no way to have DC on the output (unless of course you break transformer's insulation).

Listening to something like jazz with female vocal was breathtaking (for example Pat Metheny with Anna Maria Jopek album). One night I decided to continue listening till the morning next day. Could not stop listening to different albums. This never happened when using SS audio rig.

But from other point of view, I couldn't imagine some serious listening for classical recordings with piano, violins, cello. I would miss too many important aspects like focus, precision, separation of sections, transients handling (attack & decay), resolution, total lack of any distortion to not changing the timbre of instruments etc.

You can have -10% at Woo during black friday orders.
 
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rwortman

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Yours sounds like a unicorn ;):D

Consider sending it to amir for a one-on-one?
He probably meant to say "no audible hum in my build" That's going to depend on hearing and headphone sensitivity.
 
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