This is a review and detailed measurements of the Loxjie D50 balanced USB MQA DAC with Toslink, Coax and Bluetooth inputs. It was kindly sent to me by the company and costs US $720 on Amazon with free shipping.
The look and feel is similar to its sister company products:
The back panel has the usual connections we have come to expect in this tier product:
The unit feels quite solid giving a feeling of quality (again, typical of high-end desktop DACs).
Loxjie D50 Balanced DAC Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard of 1 kHz tone, sending bits via USB and extracting using balanced XLR outputs:
As you see, performance is exemplary with SINAD that represents relative sum of distortion and noise outperforming 95% of DACs tested so far:
Zooming in we get:
D50 can output higher voltage though and if allowed, it increases its SINAD by another dB (overcoming some of the analyzer noise):
That little glitch by the way is my audio analyzer changing scales and with it, creating more self-noise. The DAC performance is likely linearly increasing.
Here is unbalanced performance:
Dynamic range which is a measure of DAC noise is way up there of course:
Indeed, our distortion products are down -130+ dB so noise is setting SINAD by itself more or less. This is audio transparency beyond transparency.
Intermodulation distortion performance is excellent:
We have our usual reconstruction filters:
I performed my testing using Sharp setting. Despite that, some amount of imaging occurs due to attenuation not being more perfect:
As you see, there are "images" created at sampling rate - signal rate to the tune of -108 dB which is what we saw in the filter test above. Fortunately this is a measurement issue as you won't hear these spurious tones in ultrasonics and with such low amplitude.
Jitter performance is excellent using USB which runs asynchronous (blue):
Toslink/Coax require extracting and chasing the input clock and shows clear artifacts in those sequence of pulses. Fortunately levels are at or below threshold of hearing so not an audible issue.
Linearity is perfect:
Multitone is superb as well:
Conclusions
"If you measure it, it will get better." -- TQM (Total Quality Management) liaison at a company I worked at.
We started a race by measuring DACs and a number of companies decided to squeeze every bit of performance they could get out of their DAC silicon. So here we are, DAC after DAC with "instrument grade" performance, producing a level of transparency that is guaranteed to surpass every person on this planet and others I am sure.
Our test is demanding enough to still find a few minor issues like Toslink jitter and reconstruction filters not being strong enough. Fortunately they are not a barrier to transparency.
Prices have gone up due to fire at AKM factory, China shipping costs, etc. But at least we have competition to get the best possible price, feature set, support, etc. we can get.
Needless to say, I am happy to recommend the Loxjie D50 based on its measured performance.
Note: as usual, my tests are focused on performance and any issues I find in the few minutes I use the product. I am not in a position to determine reliability of a product. You all need to help each other on that.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The look and feel is similar to its sister company products:
The back panel has the usual connections we have come to expect in this tier product:
The unit feels quite solid giving a feeling of quality (again, typical of high-end desktop DACs).
Loxjie D50 Balanced DAC Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard of 1 kHz tone, sending bits via USB and extracting using balanced XLR outputs:
As you see, performance is exemplary with SINAD that represents relative sum of distortion and noise outperforming 95% of DACs tested so far:
Zooming in we get:
D50 can output higher voltage though and if allowed, it increases its SINAD by another dB (overcoming some of the analyzer noise):
That little glitch by the way is my audio analyzer changing scales and with it, creating more self-noise. The DAC performance is likely linearly increasing.
Here is unbalanced performance:
Dynamic range which is a measure of DAC noise is way up there of course:
Indeed, our distortion products are down -130+ dB so noise is setting SINAD by itself more or less. This is audio transparency beyond transparency.
Intermodulation distortion performance is excellent:
We have our usual reconstruction filters:
I performed my testing using Sharp setting. Despite that, some amount of imaging occurs due to attenuation not being more perfect:
As you see, there are "images" created at sampling rate - signal rate to the tune of -108 dB which is what we saw in the filter test above. Fortunately this is a measurement issue as you won't hear these spurious tones in ultrasonics and with such low amplitude.
Jitter performance is excellent using USB which runs asynchronous (blue):
Toslink/Coax require extracting and chasing the input clock and shows clear artifacts in those sequence of pulses. Fortunately levels are at or below threshold of hearing so not an audible issue.
Linearity is perfect:
Multitone is superb as well:
Conclusions
"If you measure it, it will get better." -- TQM (Total Quality Management) liaison at a company I worked at.
We started a race by measuring DACs and a number of companies decided to squeeze every bit of performance they could get out of their DAC silicon. So here we are, DAC after DAC with "instrument grade" performance, producing a level of transparency that is guaranteed to surpass every person on this planet and others I am sure.
Our test is demanding enough to still find a few minor issues like Toslink jitter and reconstruction filters not being strong enough. Fortunately they are not a barrier to transparency.
Prices have gone up due to fire at AKM factory, China shipping costs, etc. But at least we have competition to get the best possible price, feature set, support, etc. we can get.
Needless to say, I am happy to recommend the Loxjie D50 based on its measured performance.
Note: as usual, my tests are focused on performance and any issues I find in the few minutes I use the product. I am not in a position to determine reliability of a product. You all need to help each other on that.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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