The Mark Levinson No 526 DAC/Preamp

[Mivera]

I just found out about this little beauty. It looks like Mark Levinson has jumped on the band wagon along with Mola Mola, Phison, Classe, etc, with this very intelligent concept. However details on it are fairly sparse. I'm wondering if they are waiting for the ESS 9038 to be in full availability before we find out more?

http://news.harman.com/releases/har...featuring-high-resolution-dac-and-phono-stage

 

[amirm]

It is the unit I am eyeing for my next purchase. I will try to dig for more information. Hopefully they achieve the May release date.

 

[Mivera]

It is the unit I am eyeing for my next purchase. I will try to dig for more information. Hopefully they achieve the May release date.

You should compare it to the PD2. I would love to bring one down for a comparison.

 

[amirm]

I don't think we will be stocking that one so if I get one, it would have to be one that I buy to keep. But yes, the PD2 is a good competitor of it for my dollars .

 

[Mivera]

I don't think we will be stocking that one so if I get one, it would have to be one that I buy to keep. But yes, the PD2 is a good competitor of it for my dollars .

Well I can imagine you will get decent pricing on the ML, but at $7500, I'm not sure if it will be lower than that.

 

[Mivera]

Found a shot of the innards. Quite a bit of stuff going on in there!

 

[amirm]

Indeed. 8 power transistors for each channel???

 

[Mivera]

Indeed. 8 power transistors for each channel???

Looks like it. You can see the discrete R2R volume control for each channel with the CMOS switches as well. The XP power SMPS must be to power the DAC. I have the exact same supply here. Works great for powering DAC's with very high PSSR voltage regulators. The DAC board looks like it's a modular piece. They must have plans of using the ESS9038 as the 9018S has been discontinued. It looks like they did their own USB interface into the Altera Hybrid FPGA/CPU unit. Perhaps that's where the Clari-fi filtering algorithms are preformed as well.