This is a review and detailed measurements of SMSL VMV D1 DAC. It is on a kind loan from a forum member. It retails for USD $1,299 including free shipping on Amazon. It is a super hefty unit, far more than you can imagine from its small enclosure:
The box on the left which is permanently attached is the power supply. The bottom of the unit must be made out of lead as the entire thing is heavy.
The heart of the unit is ESS' flagship DAC, ES9038 Pro. Each channel has its own dedicated ES9038 Pro which has 8-channels internally and paralleled for better signal to noise ratio.
The display and functionality thereof are almost identical to SMSL SU-8 which I reviewed recently. In this configuration, it is way too tiny and unfitting of a device this expensive. I appreciate them leveraging what they already had but they should have stepped this up.
As with SU-8, you can choose the usual filter settings and special ESS DSP functionality to emulate tube sound and such with distortion products.
A metal but rather cheesy looking remote comes with it in silver and sparkling finish.
There are both balanced and unbalanced outputs which is nice. No headphone output however as this is strictly a DAC.
The write-up from SMSL is sadly machine translated from Chinese. But it includes a bunch of references to higher quality components, etc:
Hopefully measurements match the stated performance.
Measurements
As usual, let's start with our Dashboard view. First up is unbalanced RCA out:
We have nice, 2.1 volt output which exceeds the nominal required value of 2 volts RMS. Distortion is quite low resulting in SINAD (signal above distortion and noise) of 110 to 113 dB depending on which channel we look at. This is however at 44.1 kHz sampling. Upping the sampling rate to 192 kHz shows a problem:
We have a sharp drop in SINAD due to large number of spikes at higher frequencies (see FFT top right). To find the cause, I turned off the feed to D1 DAC and got this:
Yup, the noise is still there! To show that in "time domain," I set the levels to -70 dBFS and got this:
See the clear spikes on our sine wave! They were there at all sampling rates by the way. Lowering the sample rate lowered their repetition rate. They are not visible in my first dashboard view because the bandwidth was limited there to 22 kHz and hence all the high frequency components were filtered out. With these higher sample rates that filtering is at higher frequency allowing the spikes to intrude.
EDIT: SMSL sent me a new board which resolved this issue (and improved jitter). See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...surements-of-smsl-vmv-d1-dac.4375/post-118213
What is interesting is that the switching noise is only in unbalanced output. Balanced is completely clean!
This is just a couple of dBs worse than 44.1 kHz which is normal (we have more noise bandwidth at higher sample rates).
So this is a clear design misstep with respect to unbalanced output. Something from the digital side is bleeding into the analog side and should have been fixable seeing how it doesn't occur in balanced output.
Anyway, putting the SINAD numbers in context of other DACs, we get this:
Jitter and noise again shows lack of attention to unbalance output:
Unbalanced in red shows a number of spikes at 1 kHz increments that are absent in balanced output.
On positive news, I actually had to lower my scale to -170 dB to show the noise floor of the unit. Really good work has been put in to reduce random noise here.
Unbalanced dynamic range is good:
As is balanced:
Let's look at intermodulation distortion relative to level:
We can see pretty large deviation between the two channels. I hope they use closer spec parts in the future. We also see the usual "ESS hump" where the distortion rises at mid-levels. It is not nearly as bad as we see in lower cost ESS based DACs but is still there. Notice that the Benchmark DAC3 (in red) does NOT suffer from this even though it also uses an ESS DAC chip. Above is for balanced. Unbalanced was similar.
Wideband harmonic distortion+noise again shows the issue with spurious noise in unbalanced output:
Balanced actually beats the DAC3!
Last but not least, everyone's favorite, the linearity graph:
Usually this measurement is very slow as the analyzer struggles to get stable values at -100 to -120 dBFS. No here. The variability was very small allowing the measurement to finish very quickly. Very well done!
Conclusions
The SMSL VMV D1 comes very close to nailing its goal of bettering all other Chinese desktop DACs and rivaling or beating other western designed products. Alas, two missteps in the form of switching noise and jitter/distortion in the unbalanced output keep it from getting there.
Performance in balanced output is strong and easily earns my recommendation if that is the output you use.
I hope SMSL finds and resolves the issue with unbalanced output at which point, they will have a winner on their hand.
EDIT: SMSL sent me a new board which resolved this issue (and improved jitter). See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...surements-of-smsl-vmv-d1-dac.4375/post-118213
-------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
If you like this review, please consider donating funds to support these reviews 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).
The box on the left which is permanently attached is the power supply. The bottom of the unit must be made out of lead as the entire thing is heavy.
The heart of the unit is ESS' flagship DAC, ES9038 Pro. Each channel has its own dedicated ES9038 Pro which has 8-channels internally and paralleled for better signal to noise ratio.
The display and functionality thereof are almost identical to SMSL SU-8 which I reviewed recently. In this configuration, it is way too tiny and unfitting of a device this expensive. I appreciate them leveraging what they already had but they should have stepped this up.
As with SU-8, you can choose the usual filter settings and special ESS DSP functionality to emulate tube sound and such with distortion products.
A metal but rather cheesy looking remote comes with it in silver and sparkling finish.
There are both balanced and unbalanced outputs which is nice. No headphone output however as this is strictly a DAC.
The write-up from SMSL is sadly machine translated from Chinese. But it includes a bunch of references to higher quality components, etc:
Hopefully measurements match the stated performance.
Measurements
As usual, let's start with our Dashboard view. First up is unbalanced RCA out:
We have nice, 2.1 volt output which exceeds the nominal required value of 2 volts RMS. Distortion is quite low resulting in SINAD (signal above distortion and noise) of 110 to 113 dB depending on which channel we look at. This is however at 44.1 kHz sampling. Upping the sampling rate to 192 kHz shows a problem:
We have a sharp drop in SINAD due to large number of spikes at higher frequencies (see FFT top right). To find the cause, I turned off the feed to D1 DAC and got this:
Yup, the noise is still there! To show that in "time domain," I set the levels to -70 dBFS and got this:
See the clear spikes on our sine wave! They were there at all sampling rates by the way. Lowering the sample rate lowered their repetition rate. They are not visible in my first dashboard view because the bandwidth was limited there to 22 kHz and hence all the high frequency components were filtered out. With these higher sample rates that filtering is at higher frequency allowing the spikes to intrude.
EDIT: SMSL sent me a new board which resolved this issue (and improved jitter). See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...surements-of-smsl-vmv-d1-dac.4375/post-118213
What is interesting is that the switching noise is only in unbalanced output. Balanced is completely clean!
This is just a couple of dBs worse than 44.1 kHz which is normal (we have more noise bandwidth at higher sample rates).
So this is a clear design misstep with respect to unbalanced output. Something from the digital side is bleeding into the analog side and should have been fixable seeing how it doesn't occur in balanced output.
Anyway, putting the SINAD numbers in context of other DACs, we get this:
Jitter and noise again shows lack of attention to unbalance output:
Unbalanced in red shows a number of spikes at 1 kHz increments that are absent in balanced output.
On positive news, I actually had to lower my scale to -170 dB to show the noise floor of the unit. Really good work has been put in to reduce random noise here.
Unbalanced dynamic range is good:
As is balanced:
Let's look at intermodulation distortion relative to level:
We can see pretty large deviation between the two channels. I hope they use closer spec parts in the future. We also see the usual "ESS hump" where the distortion rises at mid-levels. It is not nearly as bad as we see in lower cost ESS based DACs but is still there. Notice that the Benchmark DAC3 (in red) does NOT suffer from this even though it also uses an ESS DAC chip. Above is for balanced. Unbalanced was similar.
Wideband harmonic distortion+noise again shows the issue with spurious noise in unbalanced output:
Balanced actually beats the DAC3!
Last but not least, everyone's favorite, the linearity graph:
Usually this measurement is very slow as the analyzer struggles to get stable values at -100 to -120 dBFS. No here. The variability was very small allowing the measurement to finish very quickly. Very well done!
Conclusions
The SMSL VMV D1 comes very close to nailing its goal of bettering all other Chinese desktop DACs and rivaling or beating other western designed products. Alas, two missteps in the form of switching noise and jitter/distortion in the unbalanced output keep it from getting there.
Performance in balanced output is strong and easily earns my recommendation if that is the output you use.
I hope SMSL finds and resolves the issue with unbalanced output at which point, they will have a winner on their hand.
EDIT: SMSL sent me a new board which resolved this issue (and improved jitter). See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...surements-of-smsl-vmv-d1-dac.4375/post-118213
-------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
If you like this review, please consider donating funds to support these reviews 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).
Last edited:
It shows up in many of my measurements and so I thought I honor it with a name.
