Review and Measurements of Audio-gd DAC19 DAC

[Newk Yuler]

It's too bad this DAC19 isn't one of the slightly later models with the FPGA. It would have been more interesting. At least the FPGA has easily available instructions for the jumper settings. I'll bet the jumper settings for the older board in this one would have been given if someone had asked Kingwa. I get the impression from the review that the panthers were pinching their noses as soon as Amir had it on his desk. Justifiably.

AFAIK nobody has determined what AGD decided to use for the latest and possibly final filter flashed into the v7 FPGA. They've treated it as a property and nobody's business unlike subjectively superior designers like Soren Kristensen at Soekris who allows users to brew their own filters and share them in a community. Soren has undoubtedly learned from the experience of others that's lead to productive revisions in updates he offers for his DAC products. AGD allows updates but only by scheduling a flashing over the internet. Use to be a user had to buy another FPGA board to get the update. Then they decided to put the FPGA on the main PCB. Anyway, the important point being they still use it in their DACs although I'm not sure about how they're set up these days. I don't shop AGD anymore (for apparent reasons).

It will be interesting to see a newer AGD DAC with the FPGA measured. It will happen sooner or later.

 

[amirm]

The FPGA cannot fix the analog response so I don't think that version would do much better.

 

[Interference]

Manufacturers are going full into this FPGA madness just to gain some more selling points for their devices and give audiophiles an entire new "fine tuning" game to play.

Why this trial-and-error should provide better result than filtering techniques developed by chip makers with multi-million dollars R&D budgets is a mystery.