Category: Digital Audio/CD Players

Denafrips Ares II DAC

January 14, 2021

Okay, I’ll admit I was smitten.  There is just something addictive, even special, about the sound of an R2R ladder DAC.  After spending several months this summer with R2R DACs from Bricasti and Rockna Audio, [Read More]

Wireworld Platinum Starlight 8 Twinax Ethernet Cables by Mike Girardi

October 7, 2020

      Some two and a half years ago, I evaluated a series of Ethernet cables and the Uptone Audio JS-2 Linear Power Supply (here). One of the Ethernet cables included in the cable [Read More]

Rockna Audio Wavelight Pre/DAC – Follow-up by Mike Wright

September 29, 2020

  This dear friend is a follow-up to Terry London’s excellent Rockna Audio Wavelight Pre/DAC review. I won’t recreate the wheel here, going over items Terry touched upon so eloquently, but will instead offer thoughts [Read More]

Rockna Audio Wavelight Pre/DAC by Terry London

September 7, 2020

    The vast majority of DACs in today’s market are single-bit Sigma-Delta designs. A much smaller segment of this market uses a multi-bit R2R ladder, NOS 16-bit DAC chips, in their approach to bringing [Read More]

Kitsune Holo Audio KTE May DAC by David Abramson

August 9, 2020

  May Day!! May Day!! “As to R2R DACs, they are extremely simple to build. You can build one yourself if you just search a bit online! Getting them to be low noise and distortion [Read More]

Bricasti Design M3 DAC by Terry London

June 9, 2020

For the last ten years, I have had more than five non-oversampling (NOS) R2R (Resistor ladder) multi-bit DACs, with tube-based digital-to-analog sections, as my digital reference in my main system. Over that time span, I [Read More]

March 13, 2020

    In the last seven years, I have had numerous DACs in-house for listening and reviewing purposes. They ranged in price from $1,200 up to $25,000 and came from such luminaries as Playback Design, [Read More]

Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC by Clement Perry

February 25, 2020

  High-End distributor Bill Parish of GTT Audio and Video serves as the USA importer/distributor for bespoke audio designs such as AudioNet, Kii Audio, YG Acoustics, and Mola Mola. Parish tends always to invite me [Read More]

Aqua Acoustic Quality La Voce S3 Discrete DAC

February 16, 2019

    When an old friend goes to the hospital for surgery, you worry. They wanted to gut him; take a burr to his Burr-Browns and stuff in a non-FDA-approved proprietary FPGA board. Lordy! We [Read More]

Merging Technology NADAC + Player and NADAC + Power Active

December 31, 2018

    Merging Technologies is one of the world’s leading manufacturer of high-resolution digital audio recording systems over the last 25 years. Merging Technologies was founded in 1990 in Chexbres, Switzerland by Claude Cellier; an [Read More]