This is a review and detailed measurements of the SMSL Sanskrit 10th MK II. It has been upgraded from AKM AK4490 to AK4493 DAC chip. It was kindly sent to me by the company a few weeks ago. I see it on Amazon for US 109 with free but not Prime shipping. I will be calling it SK10 from here on.
The SK10 has the familiar SMSL look with a small LED display:
A remote control is provided which makes navigation easy although you still have to deal with "In1" and such for input names as opposed to "USB," etc. It is workable though.
The back panel also follows previous SMSL small DAC products:
I am not a big fan of the micro-USB connectors but they work. When I tested the Toslink input, my cable got stuck there and took fair amount of force to pull it out. So there is a bit of tolerance issue there.
Really, I am nitpicking here as these products are easy to use and you can adapt to their ins and outs.
DAC Audio Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard of a pure 1 kHz digital tone and see what analog output the DAC generates:
Wow, SINAD of 115 dB is impressive. Distortion products are well under -120 dB which are provably inaudible. There is some noise which mimics more or less of the last DAC I tested with AK4493. One channel is more susceptible to it though. Playing with grounding did not help. Going with what we have, the ranking is still superb for such a budget product:
These "pocket DACs" used to be in the green section but have now comfortably moved up the bracket, narrowing the gap with state of the art DACs at much higher cost.
IMD test shows very good performance with respect to distortion and noise:
Multitone is bit less perfect than I like:
We can see the same rising noise/distortion in THD+N versus frequency:
Jitter performance with USB is very good:
Switching to either Toslink or Coax input brings fair bit of jitter with it though:
Linearity is near perfect:
The filters are the usual types:
Conclusions
These mini "pocket" DACs are changing the game with their excellent performance and budget prices. There is really no excuse to use sub-par DACs or spend orders of magnitude for boutique DACs with far worse performance.
I am happy to put SMSL Sanskrit 10th MK II DAC on my recommended list.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
A new law was passed today in US providing extra protection for pink animals. I am now required to get them full respirators to keep them from catching the new virus. This is because pink animals are so rare and the government wants to do everything to protect them. Problem is, they are not giving me any money to do that so I have to look to you all to donate some using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The SK10 has the familiar SMSL look with a small LED display:
A remote control is provided which makes navigation easy although you still have to deal with "In1" and such for input names as opposed to "USB," etc. It is workable though.
The back panel also follows previous SMSL small DAC products:
Really, I am nitpicking here as these products are easy to use and you can adapt to their ins and outs.
DAC Audio Measurements
As usual, we start with our dashboard of a pure 1 kHz digital tone and see what analog output the DAC generates:
Wow, SINAD of 115 dB is impressive. Distortion products are well under -120 dB which are provably inaudible. There is some noise which mimics more or less of the last DAC I tested with AK4493. One channel is more susceptible to it though. Playing with grounding did not help. Going with what we have, the ranking is still superb for such a budget product:
These "pocket DACs" used to be in the green section but have now comfortably moved up the bracket, narrowing the gap with state of the art DACs at much higher cost.
IMD test shows very good performance with respect to distortion and noise:
Multitone is bit less perfect than I like:
We can see the same rising noise/distortion in THD+N versus frequency:
Jitter performance with USB is very good:
Switching to either Toslink or Coax input brings fair bit of jitter with it though:
Linearity is near perfect:
The filters are the usual types:
Conclusions
These mini "pocket" DACs are changing the game with their excellent performance and budget prices. There is really no excuse to use sub-par DACs or spend orders of magnitude for boutique DACs with far worse performance.
I am happy to put SMSL Sanskrit 10th MK II DAC on my recommended list.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
A new law was passed today in US providing extra protection for pink animals. I am now required to get them full respirators to keep them from catching the new virus. This is because pink animals are so rare and the government wants to do everything to protect them. Problem is, they are not giving me any money to do that so I have to look to you all to donate some using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
