High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

  The Theta Casanova from memory used the same dac chip/s as the Casablanca which had hybrid PCM-1792A converters in it, few bits of R2R and Delta Sigma mix, it was the time of the transition period from expensive to produce R2R converters such as PCM1704 to much cheaper to make Delta Sigma.

Shanling had two identical (earlier 4x transformer model) T100 units, but one used 4 x mono PCM1704 R2R dacs, the other used 2 x stereo PCM1792 hybrid dacs. The we did a/b’s with them and the one with 4 x R2R PCM1704 dac’s was clearly the better sounding unit with redbook.

Cheers George

FYI, i had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. I was not terrible familiar.  According to them the DSPro is significantly better.  Casanova is a cool concept withe the all-digital backplane. I considered something like that back in the 1980s. Never took it anywhere for lots of practical and life reasons... mostly i had another company and another job that each demanded my time.
So our experiences may not in fact conflict.

FYI, I had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. According to them the DSPro is significantly better.

That's because all the 8 "Pro's" (except for the Pro Prime which was DS ) were all R2R and for PCM Redbook it's better, just like what we all expereienced with the two Shanling models in my last post.

Cheers George  

No, is not that simple.The cassanova card (at least the one i was holding) is also R2R. And all the DSPro's from Gen 1 were R2R. In fact, in 1994 i don't think there were sigma-delta chips yet. One of the big changes to the V and 8 was re-clocking (jitter, here we go again)

I was going to avoid the technical details, but it had to do mostly with the DSP power to execute the digital pre-filtering.
G

And all the DSPro’s from Gen 1 were R2R

Sorry, but the Pro prime was only one of the Pro series to be Delta Sigma it used the DS chip SAA7350GP. The Pro Prime II was not DS it had 2 x PCM67P-K R2R chips

In fact, in 1994 i don’t think there were sigma-delta chips yet

Sorry again, but whatever you want to call it (Delta Sigma, Bitstream, 1 Bit, Mash ect ect ) In 1984, at the Eindhoven AES convention, that Robert Adams of dbx presented a paper on their 1-bit adaptive delta-modulation A/D- and D/A-conversion system.
I had "one" of the first DS based chips in 1990 the Technics SL-PS70

No, is not that simple.The cassanova card (at least the one i was holding) is also R2R.

Sorry again the manual and other sources states it uses for D/A 24bit Delta Sigma dacs and that they are 94khz compatible. Just as the Casablanca does also.
And the A/D section conversion is also Delta Sigma but just 20bit.

I had occasion to speak to the guys at Theta about the Casanova recently. According to them the DSPro is significantly better.

This is also correct, as the DS Pro’s except for the Pro Prime, are all R2R and not DS.

Cheers George