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Mhdt Labs Pagoda Review (R2R Tube DAC)

Rate this DAC:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 262 91.3%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 4 1.4%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 20 7.0%

  • Total voters
    287

voodooless

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It really feels awkward to see so much discussion about a product by people that even did not listen to it. The mhdt Atlantis (which i bet measures as bad as this one by ASR gold standard) is one of the best sounding DACs I ve ever heard.
If you hear a DAC something is wrong. These things should be transparent and not bring any sound signature of their own. Measurements clearly show this thing has a signature and chance is high that this will be audible. Hell it can’t even resolve more than 8 bits:
1640156817236.png

So no, I don’t need to listen to it to dismiss it.
 

fcdvpds

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Why?

There are well engineered r2r DAC's out there that show very good measurements.

This is a fuzzbox...
damn...you guys comment on this stuff with very little knowledge about digital audio...this dac does not use a reconstruction filter, each sample presented to the DAC chip results in a DC output voltage that is sustained until the next sample...also all noise at high frequencies is not eliminated. This results in horrible measured performance but within the trash, the actual audio signal is less manipulated and somehow better representative of the original data. Digital audio was simply not designed to work like this but some argue that actually the low-pass filter is not needed and omitting this obligatory filter can actually deliver a more honest presentation of the music. This dac is exactly this, a broken device that offers a perspective of what digital sounds like if a few steps of the digital process are omitted. Measuring this device and commenting about the bad measurement performance is like commenting that unpolished stone is not smooth. Most people that buy this dac know what they are buying.
 

fcdvpds

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If you hear a DAC something is wrong. These things should be transparent and not bring any sound signature of their own. Measurements clearly show this thing has a signature and chance is high that this will be audible. Hell it can’t even resolve more than 8 bits:
View attachment 174001
So no, I don’t need to listen to it to dismiss it.
dude, everything has a sound signature...you think a musician wants their music to sound as it is without any manipulation? well you are wrong. You can't imagine how much most singers pay to record and master engineers to make their voice sound as good as possible which is completely different than as real as possible!
 

aj625

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damn...you guys comment on this stuff with very little knowledge about digital audio...this dac does not use a reconstruction filter, each sample presented to the DAC chip results in a DC output voltage that is sustained until the next sample...also all noise at high frequencies is not eliminated. This results in horrible measured performance but within the trash, the actual audio signal is less manipulated and somehow better representative of the original data. Digital audio was simply not designed to work like this but some argue that actually the low-pass filter is not needed and omitting this obligatory filter can actually deliver a more honest presentation of the music. This dac is exactly this, a broken device that offers a perspective of what digital sounds like if a few steps of the digital process are omitted. Measuring this device and commenting about the bad measurement performance is like commenting that unpolished stone is not smooth. Most people that buy this dac know what they are buying.
Wow what a joke, digital signal less manipulated means ? Do you mean digital audio is all about having spurious noise ? Did they have it originally in mind to not to have reconstruction filter ? Is not all digital processing a kind of manipulation ? Even your good old calculator does this manipulation. And how a multi tone test without a reconstruction filter with all kind of grass will not affect music, if you say 1khz test does not represent music ? Somehow these grass will not affect magically real music but only multi tone test ? :p My friend please stop spreading this misinformation that a digital signal manipulation while removes noise but somehow degrades the actual music by some kind of manipulation. :p
 
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voodooless

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dude, everything has a sound signature...you think a musician wants their music to sound as it is without any manipulation? well you are wrong. You can't imagine how much most singers pay to record and master engineers to make their voice sound as good as possible which is completely different than as real as possible!
I'm not a musician, nor is my DAC. They can add signatures all they want... It's their art. How dare you defile that with your own whims ;)

It's like you buying the Mona Lisa and then deciding that you don't like the colour of her eyes, and go changing them :facepalm:

And no, not everything has a sound signature. SOTA DAC's are all indistinguishable in blind tests, they all sound the same. They totally faithfully reproduce the sound of the digital samples they were given for our poor and flawed ears and brain.
 

fcdvpds

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Wow what a joke, digital signal less manipulated means ? Do you mean digital audio is all about having spurious noise ? Did they have it originally in mind to not to have reconstruction filter ? Is not all digital processing a kind of manipulation ? Even your good old calculator does this manipulation. And how a multi tone test without a reconstruction filter with all kind of grass will not affect music, if you say 1khz test does not represent music ? Somehow these grass will not affect magically real music but only multi tone test ? :p My friend please stop spreading this misinformation that a digital signal manipulation while removes noise but somehow degrades the actual music by some kind of manipulation. :p
i understand your view. put it this way, most design choices comprise trade offs. think about a digital camera. The standard is to have anti aliasing filter. Ricoh GR and a very few other cameras omit the filter. The result is increased resolution but artefacts occur in many situations that need to be removed in post processing. In general, low pass filter is the best option and that's why it's the standard choice in dacs. that being said, it is good to have alternative design options that may suit the taste of some people better. the non-sense is to complain about poor measured performance on a dac without filter!
 

fcdvpds

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I'm not a musician, nor is my DAC. They can add signatures all they want... It's their art. How dare you defile that with your own whims ;)

It's like you buying the Mona Lisa and then deciding that you don't like the colour of her eyes, and go changing them :facepalm:

And no, not everything has a sound signature. SOTA DAC's are all indistinguishable in blind tests, they all sound the same. They totally faithfully reproduce the sound of the digital samples they were given for our poor and flawed ears and brain.
sure. go buy a SOTA dac and enjoy it.
if they are indistinguishable I wonder why they sell different models...
 

solderdude

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. the non-sense is to complain about poor measured performance on a dac without filter!

The non-sense is to not use a reconstruction filter as only with it you adhere to the sampling theorem and the output signal is closest to the intended signal.

Of course, everyone is free to do whatever they think is 'better' and it does not hurt to provide options for this.
Just know these options do not improve signal quality/fidelity but deviate from it. That may have audible consequences some may even prefer.

if they are indistinguishable I wonder why they sell different models...

different connectivity, looks, options, bit-rate/bit-depth, price, also wanting a piece of the market (to make money), purpose coloration, aiming for audiophools and their wallets ... you name it.
Plenty reasons other than technical performance.
 
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aj625

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i understand your view. put it this way, most design choices comprise trade offs. think about a digital camera. The standard is to have anti aliasing filter. Ricoh GR and a very few other cameras omit the filter. The result is increased resolution but artefacts occur in many situations that need to be removed in post processing. In general, low pass filter is the best option and that's why it's the standard choice in dacs. that being said, it is good to have alternative design options that may suit the taste of some people better. the non-sense is to complain about poor measured performance on a dac without filter!
You can't compare music with photo. The analogy is only comparable if you interpolate the pixels like upsampling digital audio but since photo requires three colors to produce a picture therefore simple interpolation won't work in real time unlike audio where you have to only interpolate the amplitude values wrt time. Photos can be interpolated in pc though but still algorithm is not like dac which has refind it over the years by using lot more processing power in real time. Hq player pggb and m scaler are the example.
 

voodooless

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Oe, I missed this one

damn...you guys comment on this stuff with very little knowledge about digital audio...this dac does not use a reconstruction filter, each sample presented to the DAC chip results in a DC output voltage that is sustained until the next sample...also all noise at high frequencies is not eliminated. This results in horrible measured performance but within the trash, the actual audio signal is less manipulated and somehow better representative of the original data.
"somehow"? How then? By definition, you are always wrong with this approach. The chance that a sample value would be the correct average of the whole sample period, is very slim. Therefore it always introduces errors, as is very evident from the data.

If you were to actually make this work a little bit better, you would need to do the following: properly upsample the values to a higher sample rate (let's say at least 8x), and then average together those 8 samples to get back to the original sample rate. Then play that without a reconstruction filter. This would actually be a much better approach than just simply thinking that the value you play is the average of the sample outright
Digital audio was simply not designed to work like this but some argue that actually the low-pass filter is not needed and omitting this obligatory filter can actually deliver a more honest presentation of the music.
It measurably can't. You can find it more pleasurable, but that does not mean it's objectively a better representation. Those are two different things.
 
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tvrgeek

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Measurements correctly done are objective measures of only those things measured. They may or may not indicate if a listener likes the result or not and the standard distortion and noise tests are far from compressive. Listening is subjective. There is no such thing as objective listening. Even blind A/B testing still is a matter of how your brain perceives things.

For my ears, every newer DAC I have heard has an ugly harshness to violins, trumpets and female voices. Will a given implementation of an R2R or a tube buffer provide high enough even order distortion to hide it? That is how some are designed.

The fact that you can hear a difference between two DACs, then at least one is wrong. That is a separate question from which sounds best to you. If both sound and measure identically, it still does not prove both are not wrong.

Something not often mentioned is the accumulation of distortions. Every step, from mic to your speakers adds. Even if a given box is cleaner than one could detect on it's own doe it just add enough to raise the accumulation to objectional levels?
 

BDWoody

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This results in horrible measured performance but within the trash, the actual audio signal is less manipulated and somehow better representative of the original data.

Uh huh...
 

voodooless

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For my ears, every newer DAC I have heard has an ugly harshness to violins, trumpets and female voices. Will a given implementation of an R2R or a tube buffer provide high enough even order distortion to hide it? That is how some are designed.
Sounds like the DAC is not the problem, but rather the speakers and/or your room is.
 

Svperstar

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If this DAC wasn’t extortionately priced and didn’t have an atrocious noise floor I would honestly buy it or try it.

It would fun to experience music without any of the technological advancement we have had in the last 60 to 80 years. The noise floor of this DAC is higher than a high-end stylus rubbing off the groove of an LP.

I owned the MHDT Labs Paradisea+ a discontinued product from the same company which was basically the same thing. The sound was terrible. It made music sound very far away and robbed of dynamics. Basically you can approximate the sound but listening to your current setup but lift your headphones off of your ears about an inch so you can hear music playing but there is no seal on your headphones.
 

Svperstar

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Not trying to be snarky here, and I know subjectivity isn't a thing on the forum, but with test performance so bad, it would be interesting if there were included a listening test to at least determine if any of this is audible, and if so, by how much. The state of the data would seem to dictate such an audibility test verses a cleaner performing SOTA DAC.

I used to own an MHDT Labs Paradisea+ back in 2006. It sounds terrible. I have been telling people that for well over 10 years now.
 

fcdvpds

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I used to own an MHDT Labs Paradisea+ back in 2006. It sounds terrible. I have been telling people that for well over 10 years now.
talking 10+ years about an old DAC that has been out of production for so long?? you must be angry with something. come on, get over it. move on. I don't know much about the Paradisea...it has been discontinued for so long. I google it and only see good reviews.






Did you discuss your sound quality issues with MHDT? Could the DAC be broken? Impedance mismatch with your amp? defective tube?
Did you try to address the problem in any way?

cheers
 

fcdvpds

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I'm not a musician, nor is my DAC. They can add signatures all they want... It's their art. How dare you defile that with your own whims ;)

It's like you buying the Mona Lisa and then deciding that you don't like the colour of her eyes, and go changing them :facepalm:

And no, not everything has a sound signature. SOTA DAC's are all indistinguishable in blind tests, they all sound the same. They totally faithfully reproduce the sound of the digital samples they were given for our poor and flawed ears and brain.
It's like buying a Mona Lisa and then deciding the location and light that makes it look more pleasant to your eyes. That's why museums invest so much in lighting design...

it's fascinating how people can have so extreme opinions. this forum is full of members that believe components should change absolutely nothing to the sound and DACs should be indistinguishable sound wise. Imagine how boring that would be. Then on the other side there's guys like Mr. Ken Shindo and Mr. Kawasaki arguing that the positioning of a component like a resistor or cap will affect the sound.

Beautiful.
 
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