Measurements of RME ADI-2 DAC and Headphone Amp

[VintageFlanker]

.... just dont want to take a step back or make a lateral move in terms of SQ...

The ADI-2 DAC beats the M51 in just every measuments, apart from linearity (on par for both units). No way it would be a step back in SQ...

 

[Veri]

The RME measures better:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ents-of-rme-adi-2-dac-and-headphone-amp.7546/

Plus, the current AK4993 version is again slightly better. It is a truly solid device..

 

[Oddiofyl]

I'm torn whether to sell the M51 or not.... it's great but they came out in '12 or '13. I almost want to just keep it for the HDMI inputs and for additional digital inputs.

I thought I read somewhere that Audio Visual Therapy in Nashua sells them or can get them. They are great guys, I'm sure if that's true they will let me take one home. I am going to check with them when things get back to normal, hopefully soon

 

[Oddiofyl]

The problem with DACs is it's so subjective, plus where do you reach the point of diminishing returns... to me that M51 was the best "package" for what I could afford...slick volume control, nice feature set , and great sound . It sounds like the RME is a huge value. I am also thinking of the Benchmark DAC 3B, but does it sound better than the RME for $500 more?

 

[VintageFlanker]

The problem with DACs is it's so subjective, plus where do you reach the point of diminishing returns... to me that M51 was the best "package" for what I could afford...slick volume control, nice feature set , and great sound . It sounds like the RME is a huge value. I am also thinking of the Benchmark DAC 3B, but does it sound better than the RME for $500 more?

@Oddiofyl, I think you're missing the point of this all forum.

First, there's nothing subjective about DACs, they're transparent or they aren't. About the DAC3, you have the data to compare: both measure the same, meaning: greatly.

At last, if you're happy with the features of your M51 and how it "sounds", why would you change?

 

[Tks]

No, silent with only the amp

When you say standby you say standby, you don't mean the DAC is asleep right? (Red ring power button) you mean just idle? Because if it's the red, then I am completely lost. If it's white and doing this. Sounds like some nasty ground loop (I guess, I don't know what else it could possibly be).

 

[Schackmannen]

When you say standby you say standby, you don't mean the DAC is asleep right? (Red ring power button) you mean just idle? Because if it's the red, then I am completely lost. If it's white and doing this. Sounds like some nasty ground loop (I guess, I don't know what else it could possibly be).

If I remember corrctly I experienced something similar with my ADI-2 DAC connected to the balanced inputs of my THX 789. When the amp was on and the DAC was off (red ring) I could hear a buzz, but as soon as I turned on the DAC it disappeared. Not sure why it happened, but it wasn't an issue since I just kept the amp off whenever the DAC was off.

 

[Tks]

If I remember corrctly I experienced something similar with my ADI-2 DAC connected to the balanced inputs of my THX 789. When the amp was on and the DAC was off (red ring) I could hear a buzz, but as soon as I turned on the DAC it disappeared. Not sure why it happened, but it wasn't an issue since I just kept the amp off whenever the DAC was off.

Okay I just tested it also with my 789, and on high gain(and only high gain, I'll test it also with IEM's another day, and see if the issues are present in low gain, since the buzz is somewhat present with mid-gain, but very faint) with HD58X's the buzz increases as you raise the volume while the RME is red ring standby.

How peculiar. Just to make sure it had nothing to do with the amp, and everything to do with the DAC. If I disconnect the XLR's, it stops buzzing, or if I leave the XLR's, and just unplug the RME from the electrical socket, it would also stop buzzing (I thought maybe the XLR interface itself was causing this regardless of power, but no, it has everything to do with the standby mode). Or so I thought..

This got me a bit curious so now I started playing around with various input selections and plugging stuff in and out. While also testing to see if the input selector on the 789 does anything, since this amp has that weird hybrid balanced or fake balanced configuration that I find mysterious.

If you really want to hear the buzz, you can get it pretty loud by choosing SE input selector, and plugging in a pair of RCA's into the THX (the odd thing now, in this configuration, you don't even need to plug the RCA's into the RME. You can literally just have a pair of RCA's connected and dangling off the 789, and in high gain, the buzz is audible completely. Another pattern I noticed, plugging in your headphones in SE vs Balanced, seems to just lower the amount of buzzing. With SE INPUT selector on the 789, no XLR innterconnects, only RCA's dangling off the 789, the buzz is loudest if you plug in your headphone into the 4-pin balanced headphone out... Seems that just amplifies the buzz (seems to be evidence of the 'fake balanced' approach perhaps). If you leave this setup as is, and choose the input selector to be Balanced, the buzz loudness is cut a bit. If you move your headphones to the SE connections, the buzz is also less. So in some weird unepexpected irony, balanced headphone out actually amplifies the volume of the buzz.. Odd considering convention of what balanced is supposed to do with respect to ground loops.

So now, with RCA's connected, and just dangling and connected to nothing, the buzz is most audible (even with the RME unplugged). What's now even more odd, is if I plug in the RCA's to the RME (and leave the RME unplugged) the buzz is far less audible. And if I plug in the RME so that it's in red ring standby, the noise is completely gone. So 4pin headphone out + Input selector to SE + High Gain:

With RCA's dangling off the THX 789 at max volume, loud buzz you could probably hear across a room if hooked up to speakers.
With RCA's connected to the RME without any electricity running through it, the buzz is very faint.
With RCA's connected and RME in red ring standby, no more buzz.

How peculiar all this seems to be.. While not really a problem for me since I follow the golden rule of amps [last on, first off], I can imagine this being a problem for passive speaker folks using power amps that they turn off due to crazy Class A design idle power draw numbers..

So it seems with this THX amp, this connection with the SE portion of the hardware seems to be contributing to some groundloops in some way. There is just a litany of configurations all contributing various amounts of this buzz regardless of your settings, (and actually with the RME powered off, the buzz gets even worse in some configurations). Also I noticed touching the RCA's seems to transfer the buzz amount from one channel to the other (I can literally play with it all day and the seemingly random volume of buzz fluctuations that seem to be occuring as I use the RCA's even if dangling off the 789, or plugged into the RME while fully powered off, or with the RME in red ring standby).

I would definitely need a spreadsheet to detail the results of every possible configuration of this issue that doesn't have much rhyme. It doesn't help that I'm not using what many here would consider "fully balanced" amp design, so it just makes this whole issue a complete mess.

Very weird, and definitely outside my ballpark of expertise (who am I kidding, it's outside my ballpark in totality). It definitely doesn't seem like the RME is to blame though, as it's operation seemingly dampens this buzz it seems, even if fully powered off.

Two more weird things specifically with the 789.. First, the amp power on/off, sometimes has one click (as has been the case before this experimentation). But after this whole ordeal it does two clicks while powering on (this was the default behavior until the one-click power on started a few days ago, which I somewhat enjoyed. Now the one-click on/off behavior seems exclusive to mid-gain (Does this mean that mid-gain is unity gain? And low/high gain are actually attenuation?).

But more importantly (I don't know if it's because I've been fucking around with the volume knob so much, or whatever reason. But my scratchy pot is currently COMPLETELY gone. Like no matter what gain I am now in, the scratchyness is gone in totality. I've tried to cure it before by running the pot up and down the volume spectrum for minutes on end, and it would cure nothing for longer than a few minutes (and no matter how much running up and down I did of the knob, it would NEVER cure this one nasty right channel scratch that occurs at 10 oclock, it's so loud I honestly feel it's damaging my hearing when it happens the first time in the day as the scratch is fresh from the device being cold and all that usually down time that returns scratchiness back to pots).

I have no idea how on Earth ALL scratchiness is gone (I literally can't press how insane this feels, NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING I did before was capable of removing all scratch). But this experimentation I've done has now removed it at at all portions of the pot position. I'm so happy I can't even tell you (contemplated tossing this amp aiming to buy another).

Sorry for the long post folks.

 

[Veri]

Okay I just tested it also with my 789, and on high gain(and only high gain, I'll test it also with IEM's another day, and see if the issues are present in low gain, since the buzz is somewhat present with mid-gain, but very faint) with HD58X's the buzz increases as you raise the volume while the RME is red ring standby.

How peculiar. Just to make sure it had nothing to do with the amp, and everything to do with the DAC. If I disconnect the XLR's, it stops buzzing, or if I leave the XLR's, and just unplug the RME from the electrical socket, it would also stop buzzing (I thought maybe the XLR interface itself was causing this regardless of power, but no, it has everything to do with the standby mode). Or so I thought..

This got me a bit curious so now I started playing around with various input selections and plugging stuff in and out. While also testing to see if the input selector on the 789 does anything, since this amp has that weird hybrid balanced or fake balanced configuration that I find mysterious.

If you really want to hear the buzz, you can get it pretty loud by choosing SE input selector, and plugging in a pair of RCA's into the THX (the odd thing now, in this configuration, you don't even need to plug the RCA's into the RME. You can literally just have a pair of RCA's connected and dangling off the 789, and in high gain, the buzz is audible completely. Another pattern I noticed, plugging in your headphones in SE vs Balanced, seems to just lower the amount of buzzing. With SE INPUT selector on the 789, no XLR innterconnects, only RCA's dangling off the 789, the buzz is loudest if you plug in your headphone into the 4-pin balanced headphone out... Seems that just amplifies the buzz (seems to be evidence of the 'fake balanced' approach perhaps). If you leave this setup as is, and choose the input selector to be Balanced, the buzz loudness is cut a bit. If you move your headphones to the SE connections, the buzz is also less. So in some weird unepexpected irony, balanced headphone out actually amplifies the volume of the buzz.. Odd considering convention of what balanced is supposed to do with respect to ground loops.

So now, with RCA's connected, and just dangling and connected to nothing, the buzz is most audible (even with the RME unplugged). What's now even more odd, is if I plug in the RCA's to the RME (and leave the RME unplugged) the buzz is far less audible. And if I plug in the RME so that it's in red ring standby, the noise is completely gone. So 4pin headphone out + Input selector to SE + High Gain:

With RCA's dangling off the THX 789 at max volume, loud buzz you could probably hear across a room if hooked up to speakers.
With RCA's connected to the RME without any electricity running through it, the buzz is very faint.
With RCA's connected and RME in red ring standby, no more buzz.

How peculiar all this seems to be.. While not really a problem for me since I follow the golden rule of amps [last on, first off], I can imagine this being a problem for passive speaker folks using power amps that they turn off due to crazy Class A design idle power draw numbers..

So it seems with this THX amp, this connection with the SE portion of the hardware seems to be contributing to some groundloops in some way. There is just a litany of configurations all contributing various amounts of this buzz regardless of your settings, (and actually with the RME powered off, the buzz gets even worse in some configurations). Also I noticed touching the RCA's seems to transfer the buzz amount from one channel to the other (I can literally play with it all day and the seemingly random volume of buzz fluctuations that seem to be occuring as I use the RCA's even if dangling off the 789, or plugged into the RME while fully powered off, or with the RME in red ring standby).

I would definitely need a spreadsheet to detail the results of every possible configuration of this issue that doesn't have much rhyme. It doesn't help that I'm not using what many here would consider "fully balanced" amp design, so it just makes this whole issue a complete mess.

Very weird, and definitely outside my ballpark of expertise (who am I kidding, it's outside my ballpark in totality). It definitely doesn't seem like the RME is to blame though, as it's operation seemingly dampens this buzz it seems, even if fully powered off.

Two more weird things specifically with the 789.. First, the amp power on/off, sometimes has one click (as has been the case before this experimentation). But after this whole ordeal it does two clicks while powering on (this was the default behavior until the one-click power on started a few days ago, which I somewhat enjoyed. Now the one-click on/off behavior seems exclusive to mid-gain (Does this mean that mid-gain is unity gain? And low/high gain are actually attenuation?).

But more importantly (I don't know if it's because I've been fucking around with the volume knob so much, or whatever reason. But my scratchy pot is currently COMPLETELY gone. Like no matter what gain I am now in, the scratchyness is gone in totality. I've tried to cure it before by running the pot up and down the volume spectrum for minutes on end, and it would cure nothing for longer than a few minutes (and no matter how much running up and down I did of the knob, it would NEVER cure this one nasty right channel scratch that occurs at 10 oclock, it's so loud I honestly feel it's damaging my hearing when it happens the first time in the day as the scratch is fresh from the device being cold and all that usually down time that returns scratchiness back to pots).

I have no idea how on Earth ALL scratchiness is gone (I literally can't press how insane this feels, NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING I did before was capable of removing all scratch). But this experimentation I've done has now removed it at at all portions of the pot position. I'm so happy I can't even tell you (contemplated tossing this amp aiming to buy another).

Sorry for the long post folks.

This post seems highly caffeine fueled

Glad you fixed the scratchiness I had that too with my amp. Never got rid of it but it was only at early levels of the knob, when going away from lowest volume levels.

 

[Tks]

This post seems highly caffeine fueled

Glad you fixed the scratchiness I had that too with my amp. Never got rid of it but it was only at early levels of the knob, when going away from lowest volume levels.

Try all this crap I did, maybe you'll also get lucky. I'm still in disbelief, and feel it will return in a few hours or tomorrow at latest. If it doesn't, I think I'll buy up THX amps and market them as special edition scratch-proof pots

 

[Ykar]

Hi,

I recevied my RME dac yesterday, and this little box sounds pretty awesome !
Just have a little concern: when I standy the DAC, I can ear some hum noise on my speakers. (audible >3m)
As soon as the dac is switch on, it's dead silent.

Do you experiment the same ?
My setup is: toslink -> RME DAC -> XLR -> ncore nc122mp

Thanks

I would be curious to know if related to pin 1 beeing connected to earth through chassis on this amp build. I have same set up but with Audiophonics 2 x nc250mp and it's dead silent, whatever RME DAC state and whatever is connected to it. Only difference I see is pin 1 (XLR screen) and amp ground beeing off earth on my amp, despite conflicting Hypex guidance.

 

[LTig]

Hi,

I recevied my RME dac yesterday, and this little box sounds pretty awesome !
Just have a little concern: when I standy the DAC (red circle), I can ear some hum noise on my speakers. (audible >3m)
As soon as the dac is switch on (white circle), it's dead silent.

Do you experiment the same ?
My setup is: toslink -> RME DAC -> XLR -> ncore nc122mp

Thanks

Just did this test with my RME ADI-2 PRO fs (not the DAC!) connected to Genelec 8020: The 8020s are dead quiet even with volume at 100 %, regardless of the state of the RME. Normal volume is at 10 o'clock.

 

[SoZo]

Well just got my RME ADI-2 DAC hooked up...
That was one small step for UPS, one giant step for me. Crazy good, just get one or two....

 

[ShiZo]

I just noticed mine has no kensington lock but does have the new sd old filter.

 

[Veri]

I just noticed mine has no kensington lock but does have the new sd old filter.

SD LD right?

 

[ShiZo]

Yeah I have the new SD LD but no kensington lock, is that normal? CE is directly above the power plug.

I found some pics of the different layouts.

 

[CMB]

HI ShiZo,
I have the V2 version with SD LD and no Kensington lock either. At least, I could not find it.
And, I don't really miss it either.

 

[MC_RME]

The Kensington Lock hole was added after the first batch of new devices. If you got the new remote the unit is AK4493, but if you want to be very sure check the SDLD filter. It's really that simple, that filter will not show up with AK4490 units.

 

[TheInquiring]

Any advantages using RME ADI-2 DAC FS direct vs. employing a separate quality preamp (740P, e.g.), please?
Please chime in: both anecdotal and objective reports are most welcome!

 

[Oddiofyl]

@Oddiofyl, I think you're missing the point of this all forum.

First, there's nothing subjective about DACs, they're transparent or they aren't. About the DAC3, you have the data to compare: both measure the same, meaning: greatly.

At last, if you're happy with the features of your M51 and how it "sounds", why would you change?

You are asking someone who's been into audio for forty years why I'd want to change?
That's silly, digital front ends are improving exponentially. I've that DAC 6 years, that's a long time in this game. I guess I am on the wrong forum if what's paramount is the numbers. I don't care much about the specs as I do the sound. I've had gear with great specs that sounded lifeless. I'll pose my question somewhere else, thanks