Allnic 5000DAC

All I can say, for me are technical specs (very good ones) essential. And the next step is a sonic layout which can deliver a real thing sound. That combination is rare. We find a lot of units with top specs which sound dead like a piece of wood and you find a lot of good sounding units which have no technical standard, which can be rated in the wide, endless "I like it Section. This "I like it" has nothing to do with High End. It is a personal opinion. You can like your car stereo, or MP3, or something expensive which is cheap internally. In a way, I would say, modern High End is loaded with low end "solutions". The term High End is stretched too much in the last 15 years, it is time to create a complete new chapter.
How about "Fun End"?

Some time ago, when the Allnic Hype flooded Audiogon I went to an owner who had the top line Pre and Phono (I think it was 3000 or something like that at that time). He had a similar electronics, Turntable, Arm, cabling and a Lyra Olympos.
We let it run and to be honest I never say something when I am invited. It is my experience and I respect every owner. It is his money, his time, his Fun. Or, when someone is a Fan of Dudley's Finest...I have no problem with it. He asked me several times what I think about it and after a while I said "You don't want to know that".
Anyway, he insisted. Fact was (or is), those Allnics blow up the Tone but that's it. The Phono was not able to deliver the abilities from the Olympos. I need some time to believe that but no matter what setting we used, 70% was not existing AND it was in a way wrong. I had no explanation for that and the last chance for us was to bypass the Phono section via MM with an external SUT (that one had top specs and was a custom made one) and from the first second all in the room said "THAT is MUCH much better"....To finish that story, I was only allowed to leave him when he could keep the SUT.
I deleted Allnic from my memory and when I did read the comment from JA it came back. did it astonish me? Well, no.

Syntax,
Your examples still make the obvious point that listening was required to make the ultimate decision. No escaping that fact. It all subjective, you didn't care for Allnic yet others love them. Some listeners don't care for Lamm, but you do, see what I mean? Measurements or technical specs can be good,bad or indifferent, you're still going to have to actually hear the product.

Technical specs serve a purpose just as Al has pointed out numerous times and he's right. They will tell you next to nothing in terms of the sound quality. You can't buy any audio component and based solely on its specs have any idea if you'll enjoy it or not. If there's are some where this is possible someone please let me know. Thanks.
Charles,

I have just read the Allnic review.... correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see any mention of listening to the DAC via transport with physical Redbook cds. I find this very disturbing.

Before I read the review, I thought maybe Allnic took the Audio Note approach of not filtering the digital datastream, which would lead to some poor measurements. I was frankly surprised that the Allnic employed upsampling and other digital manipulations and measure that badly.

So the reviewer said it was the best-sounding digital he ever heard, and JA said it was the worst-measuring digital he ever saw. Go figure. IMO, that reviewer was not qualified to review this product, as his experience with digital was extremely limited. His preference is analog and his digital consists of a $450 Halide dac. Also, as Lula pointed out, it appears that the Allnic was only reviewed via the USB input, and there could potentially be large differences, for better or worse, using a transport through the SPDIF input or whatever.

Having owned the D5000 for the last 5 months, I encourage everyone reading this thread not to dismiss this dac based on the Stereophile review.

After reviewing the article and researching some background regarding the physical dac used by Stereophile, I am somewhat perplexed myself.

The D5000 was first bench tested by John Atkinson, then reviewed by Art Dudley. As we have read, there is a significant discordance between the actual bench test and the reviewer's cerebral perception. I have no desire to be critical of either the approach or perception. This unit may simply demonstrate that the bench tests performed by Mr. Atkinson, while producing accurate measurement, do not translate to poor sonic qualities.

Could DHT tubes by nature test poorly?

The unit was returned to Korea and found to have 3 faulty DHT tubes, is suspected to have been damaged in shipping. This obviously can not be confirmed. Allnic has requested Mr. Atkinson to re-test with a different unit.

Interestingly, I had one DHT tube fail myself after 350-450 hours and observed no sonic degradation. Replacing the tube was easy and took only a few minutes.

On the first paragraph of Mr. Atkinson's review states "Apple's USB prober utility identified the processor as the 'D-5000' from 'ALLNIC SOUND' with the serial-number string 'USB' and confirmed that the USB input operated in the isochronous asynchronous mode." I did not read in the review: isochronous adaptive mode.

I spoke with the head engineer who also confirmed USB asynchronous mode, with similar traffic behavior to the XMOS chipset, although the standard UAC 2.0 is their own proprietary design with galvanic isolation.

I will post my thoughts of the dac itself soon. To my ears and those around me, it best EMM DAC2x. I also had less issues with the XMOS driver, which is used in both units.

Both the D5000 and the Empirical Overdrive SE loaded are wonderful dacs, each with their own qualities. If you desire DSD playback, I recommend auditioning this dac.

Sunil at Careaudio has a Allnic demo program. Mattenship will be auditioning the D5000 on his audiogon blog and I am curious to compare notes with his shootout with Empirical.

I own both dacs. If you are in my geographic region, you are welcome to listen for yourself.