Oversampling DAC Vs. Non Oversampling?

Matt - "forward and aggressive" is an issue of system matching. Your Dali speakers would not like SS amp with bright DAC. My older Paradigm speakers were a little forward with class D amp and Benchmark DAC but new Hyperion 938 speakers sound laid back and relaxed (but not warm) delivering even more detail.

There is an important difference between oversampling and upsampling DACs. Upsampling DACs do asynchronous resampling suppressing jitter (noise in time domain) in the process. I like sound of my upsampling Benchmark DAC1 and get additional benefit of working equally well with any transport (even cheapest DVD player or Airport Express)or digital cable. Benchmark is very revealing and neutral sounding - not for people who look for warm sound.

Matt - post your experience with WEISS DAC2. I'm interested since it might be improvement to my Benchmark.

Kijanki -
I sold the Weiss because it sounded very flat and dull compared to the nos Valab in my system. There was no excitement in the sound at all and the holographic experience that I got from the 200 dollar Valab was almost totally absent in the $3000 Weiss.

I asked the person who bought the Weiss what he thought about it and his 2 word response was 'it sucks'.

I have not heard anything better in my system than the Valab. I am getting ready to build an Audio Note Dac 3.1 kit in my search for the best sounding dac that I can afford for my system.

So far, I have put the Valab up against the Weiss, a Bryston BD1, a Musical Fidelity TriVista 21.... it has sounded obviously much better than any one of these in my system to me and my close audiophile friends. I am getting excited about comparing the Audio Note to it next.

Matt - I'm sorry to hear it didn't work for you. No excitement I can understand, as some DACs like Benchmark sound less exciting (or too clean), but poor soundstaging is disturbing (for expensive DAC). Benchmark brings tons of low level details and according to review decent soundstaging but Audionote imaging is a little deeper. I'm working on taming my room acoustics that, as you might remember, is far from being perfect. I bought twelve 2'x4'x2" sound absorbing panels and plan to buy 6 more. I was in a demo room where all walls were made of this material and even sound of voice was incredibly pure and directional.

So far Hyperion speakers were the greatest improvement to my system and brought musicality and warmth to neutral (unforgiving) Benchmark + Rowland 102. I've noticed that new generation of DACs use FPGA (programmable logic) ICs to execute filter algorithm. Non-apodizing filter in new Merdidian CDP, with different step response, suggests possible improvements in filtering (ovesampling or upsampling schemes). The main purpose of executing filters in FPGAs is speed. FPGA can do everything required in one cycle (clock tick) that uP would have to do in many machine cycles.

Mattzack2, if you do build that 3.1 Audio Note , be sure to not install the diodes the kit provides for the digital supply board. Schottky makes much better diodes, that will open your highs, and dynamics as you never would have believed. I truly believe that cheap diode upgrade will lift your player's capability significantly higher than the Signature transformer upgrade. You will simply love the sound.

Good to hear from you Vince.