I have a confession to make ;
I have owned, not just one, but two direct stream dacs from PS-Audio.
The first one was a DS Junior DAC (now discontinued)
The second was the one tested here.
It all began with the usual "what can I improve on my rig", which at the time consisted of
a Hegel H360 and a pair of Dynaudio Focus 160 speakers. I used the internal dac on the 360 as the main source for listening.
- " It is time for a new dac" I said to myself.
Not that I was disappointed in any way with how my rig sounded at the time, but everything can always be better !
The never ending search for that audio-nirvana. I think a lot of you know what I mean.
A lot of reading/researching and comparing reviews ended with a need to purchase the sensational DS Junior DAC.
Proprietary FPGA conversion and free updates for improved sound quality, what is not to like about that !
My first Junior lasted for about a week or so, then it started to develop problems when navigating
user menues using the button beside the display. The volume knob also had a strange feeling in the
feedback when rotated. It is actually a stepper motor that are used as an encoder. Quite clever really.
The other thing I noted was that the unbalanced outputs on the Junior produced a faint "out of phase mains buzz"
when connected to my headphone amplifier. The balanced outs was connected to the Hegel.
With either left OR right rca connected the buzz was not there, but with both connected it came back.
Same thing when I connected DS to the Hegel line inputs - with xlr disconnected of course.
- "You have a ground loop !" said the - initially helpful - support at PS Audio.
The hp-amplifier was tried with a battery as powersource and the only connection to the Junior was the hp-amp,
both standing alone on a table. The only ground was through DS mains cable, which by the way was fed from
an isolation transformer I had in my lab with midpoint ground on secondary side, it has no ground on primary side.
Still the out of phase buzz was there, tracking the hp-amp volume, how can there be a ground loop now ?
I asked on the PS Audio forum, the thread ended in that it must be a grould loop issue and nothing else.
However I got a private reply from another user suffering from the same issue. He had sold his Junior by then.
The Junior was now sent back to dealer with comment that apart from the navigation problem, there was also a ground loop issue.
A new one arrived - navigation worked as intended, volume feedback was ok, but the mains noise on unbalanced
outputs was the same. A long discussion with PS Audio support ended with me insisting that they should try
the Junior unbalanced outputs to an amplifier with common grounding for the rca-sleeves and listen for themselves.
The answer then was just that my dac is within its specifications and nothing was wrong. Sure.
I lived with that for a few months (I did not use headphones a lot during this time)
Then I got an offer from my dealer to exchange the Junior to a Senior dac (the one tested here) for a very small added price !
Whay could go wrong, this one must be a better one, right ?
Ok, the Senior was mine for about a year. More noise than the Hegel DAC (a little less than Junior anyway).
The GUI was sometimes upside down after boot, so I constantly had to recalibrate the screen. Odd indeed.
Sometimes after boot, there was just noise in one channel when playing music.
No out of phase noise on the unbalanced outs !
And about these updates - I had to repeat some updates several times after another for them to succeed.
Sometimes the sound was like an old 78rpm recordning after update was finished.
I asked why this was never an issue when you update the simplest of bluetooth speakers for example.
Or a motherboard BIOS, either it works, or is does not. Are there no checksums or whatever ?
I was told that it was important where the FPGA decided to store the code in memory, and that it affected sound quality.
Ok..
After one of the updates (after sucess), I heard that at low volume that sound became distorted, just like crossover distortion.
I reverted back to the previous version and then I sold the DS. I got almost as much as I paid for it.
I am done with PS Audio. This was about 4 years ago and long before I found this place.
Enough said.