This is a review and detailed measurements of the KORG DS-DAC-100 Balanced DAC and headphone amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member. It retails for USD $446 with free shipping from Amazon.
If you are not familiar with KORG, they are a Japanese company which has been producing professional audio products for years. They have a respectable reputation. Given that and high price of this unit, my expectations of fidelity was high.
Perhaps the most claim to fame of the KORG DS-DAC-100 is its very unusual industrial design, harkening to the science fiction modern style of 1960s:
In a word: it is adorable!
Note the spikes below that act as feet. With the bit of weight the unit has, you better careful in putting it on top of your precious wood desk or other surface that can scratch.
As I noted earlier, this DAC has balanced XLR outputs. But unusually at this price, it has no other inputs than USB. This is fine for me in desktop application but will likely be a concern for some others who may want to connect other devices to the unit.
Also strange is the fact that the unit is USB powered. Getting decent output from XLR connections may be a problem and at any rate, unusual again at this price point.
All of this simplifies the unit though: you just have a volume control for the 1/4 inch headphone jack and that is that. The rear outputs are fixed.
The DS-DAC-100 doesn't appear to be UAC2 compliant so plugging it into my WIndows 10 system did nothing. I had to download a massive package to the tune of 200 Megabytes just to get the drivers. The rest was for their player app which emphasizes DSD playback.
Let's get into the measurements and see how she does. Note: I tested the DS_DAC-100 using ASIO4ALL wrapper around KORG's WDM (windows driver). Attempting to use the native KORG ASIO driver simply crashed the Audio Precision analyzer app.
Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard view with RCA outputs:
Output level is fine at 2 volts but distortion is disappointing.
Contributing to that distortion figure is extra spikes that are not harmonically related to the main 1 kHz tone the DAC is being asked to produce. Here is the FFT with higher resolution showing that:
That is really strange. Even more strange is the fact that changing the signal tone changes those extra spikes. Here is the output when the DAC is fed 3 kHz tone:
Something is really broken here. The problem is in digital domain as balanced output shows the same issue:
We have a new problem here is the output level does not change at all! We are supposed to get 4 volts, not 2 volts. I wonder if these are dummy XLR connectors that are just tied to RCA outs and there are no balanced drivers.
Needless to say, SINAD (signal relative to noise and distortion) is disappointing compared to previously tested DAC:
It sits in tier three with one being the best, and four the worst.
Intermodulation distortion tests follow the dashboard THD+N figures naturally:
Note how the balanced and unbalanced have identical performance. And at any rate, both are much worse than our reference, $250 Topping DX3 Pro.
Dynamic range is predictably the same for both outputs:
There are some positives here such as jitter:
This is very nice performance. Linearity likewise is near perfect:
For the fans of our 32-tone test signal, here is that for both outputs:
Switching to headphone output performance we see nice, low output impedance of less than 1 ohm:
That good news evaporates though when we measure power versus distortion and noise:
The KORG DS-DAC-100 gets us coming and going. It has more noise and distortion while producing a fraction of power that our reference Topping DX3 Pro produces.
Story repeats itself at 33 ohm:
These are just not competitive numbers.
Listening Tests
I played my headphone test tracks using my Sennheiser HD-650. There simply is not enough power here. On the famous "Limbo" track from Yello, I could not get anything close to enough volume or satisfactory bass sensation out of the KORG DS-DAC-100. On other tracks it did OK but OK is not the name of the game in premium desktop DAC and headphone products.
Conclusions
I have been lusting after KORG DS-DAC-100 ever saw its picture and really cute industrial design. Whoever did that work needs to get a raise. Likewise some aspects of the circuit design responsible for good linearity and jitter deserve some praise. But the news gets ugly really fast from there on. Overall distortion and noise metrics are not competitive. We have design flaws with non-harmonic and frequency dependent spurious tones. Maybe those things are not audible but lack of output power certainly is.
This product needs to be redesigned with external power, much beefier headphone amplifier and fixed digital implementation. Then it would be a winner. As it is, I have to give the KORG DS-DAC-100 a failing grade.
-------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Can you imagine how much fun it would be for me to go to UK and harass Thomas? Please consider donating money so I can fly there using:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or
upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
If you are not familiar with KORG, they are a Japanese company which has been producing professional audio products for years. They have a respectable reputation. Given that and high price of this unit, my expectations of fidelity was high.
Perhaps the most claim to fame of the KORG DS-DAC-100 is its very unusual industrial design, harkening to the science fiction modern style of 1960s:
In a word: it is adorable!
Note the spikes below that act as feet. With the bit of weight the unit has, you better careful in putting it on top of your precious wood desk or other surface that can scratch.
As I noted earlier, this DAC has balanced XLR outputs. But unusually at this price, it has no other inputs than USB. This is fine for me in desktop application but will likely be a concern for some others who may want to connect other devices to the unit.
Also strange is the fact that the unit is USB powered. Getting decent output from XLR connections may be a problem and at any rate, unusual again at this price point.
All of this simplifies the unit though: you just have a volume control for the 1/4 inch headphone jack and that is that. The rear outputs are fixed.
The DS-DAC-100 doesn't appear to be UAC2 compliant so plugging it into my WIndows 10 system did nothing. I had to download a massive package to the tune of 200 Megabytes just to get the drivers. The rest was for their player app which emphasizes DSD playback.
Let's get into the measurements and see how she does. Note: I tested the DS_DAC-100 using ASIO4ALL wrapper around KORG's WDM (windows driver). Attempting to use the native KORG ASIO driver simply crashed the Audio Precision analyzer app.
Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard view with RCA outputs:
Output level is fine at 2 volts but distortion is disappointing.
Contributing to that distortion figure is extra spikes that are not harmonically related to the main 1 kHz tone the DAC is being asked to produce. Here is the FFT with higher resolution showing that:
That is really strange. Even more strange is the fact that changing the signal tone changes those extra spikes. Here is the output when the DAC is fed 3 kHz tone:
Something is really broken here. The problem is in digital domain as balanced output shows the same issue:
We have a new problem here is the output level does not change at all! We are supposed to get 4 volts, not 2 volts. I wonder if these are dummy XLR connectors that are just tied to RCA outs and there are no balanced drivers.
Needless to say, SINAD (signal relative to noise and distortion) is disappointing compared to previously tested DAC:
It sits in tier three with one being the best, and four the worst.
Intermodulation distortion tests follow the dashboard THD+N figures naturally:
Note how the balanced and unbalanced have identical performance. And at any rate, both are much worse than our reference, $250 Topping DX3 Pro.
Dynamic range is predictably the same for both outputs:
There are some positives here such as jitter:
This is very nice performance. Linearity likewise is near perfect:
For the fans of our 32-tone test signal, here is that for both outputs:
Switching to headphone output performance we see nice, low output impedance of less than 1 ohm:
That good news evaporates though when we measure power versus distortion and noise:
The KORG DS-DAC-100 gets us coming and going. It has more noise and distortion while producing a fraction of power that our reference Topping DX3 Pro produces.
Story repeats itself at 33 ohm:
These are just not competitive numbers.
Listening Tests
I played my headphone test tracks using my Sennheiser HD-650. There simply is not enough power here. On the famous "Limbo" track from Yello, I could not get anything close to enough volume or satisfactory bass sensation out of the KORG DS-DAC-100. On other tracks it did OK but OK is not the name of the game in premium desktop DAC and headphone products.
Conclusions
I have been lusting after KORG DS-DAC-100 ever saw its picture and really cute industrial design. Whoever did that work needs to get a raise. Likewise some aspects of the circuit design responsible for good linearity and jitter deserve some praise. But the news gets ugly really fast from there on. Overall distortion and noise metrics are not competitive. We have design flaws with non-harmonic and frequency dependent spurious tones. Maybe those things are not audible but lack of output power certainly is.
This product needs to be redesigned with external power, much beefier headphone amplifier and fixed digital implementation. Then it would be a winner. As it is, I have to give the KORG DS-DAC-100 a failing grade.
-------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Can you imagine how much fun it would be for me to go to UK and harass Thomas? Please consider donating money so I can fly there using:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/audiosciencereview), or
upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
