Mark Levinson No 360S DAC Review

[qsl]

"Where there cheap choices then that were good? We will never know without a time machine to go back and measure as we do today."

I think I have a Perpetual Technologies DAC and upsampler (P3a and P1a respectively) floating about. They were considered best bang for the buck around that time (around a grand apiece). Let me know if you want to test them.

 

[mccririck]

Just need to look at old hifi magazines to see which CD players were well liked.

 

[Jimster480]

Truly something that withstood the test of time. 20 years later it still measures well and I'm sure sounds fine. That is the beauty of audio since it doesn't move like video with all these formats and higher resolutions.

 

[georgehifi]

Truly something that withstood the test of time. 20 years later it still measures well and I'm sure sounds fine.

That's because it's a well designed R2R ladder dac using (4 x PCM1704 dac chips)

Cheers George

 

[Jimster480]

That's because it's a well designed R2R ladder dac using (4 x PCM1704 dac chips)

Cheers George

it is one of the great things about audio. The resolution doesn't change like with Video over the last decades. So you could literally still use a device like this from 20 years ago and use it every day and know you are likely not missing out on anything basically ever...

 

[Sokel]

Bur-Brown PCM1704 must have been popular back then,my ancient DENON DVD5000 also uses 4 of them (and I still have no complains about it's sound) .

 

[Doodski]

Oh, science is great. ASR has been a breath of fresh air, truly. It's just the "everything is the same" part (or, similarly, "everything can be made to sound the same if you tweak positioning, EQ, etc.") that I personally don't buy. I don't have the capacity to go through a hundred different DACs to decide that they are actually very similar. I much prefer to pick 3 "scientifically approved" ones and choose one that I like the most, subjectively. I don't care that a fancy, cardioid, active Kii Three is a perfect speaker, to me it doesn't sound very good. But an equally fancy, cardioid, active ME Geithain does, and I like the way it looks in my room, and I don't need to experiment with its positioning for weeks to make it perform the way I like.

ASR has it's limitations and I acknowledge that. I still don't see how people come up with chocolaty midrange and other subjective determinations.