Older is better - D/A chip?


I had three audio nuts over my house yesterday for a component shoot out. I have a highly modded Jolida JD100 tube cd player with Mullard tubes. We then swapped in an old Magnavox player running a TDA1540 chip. This player has been recapped, extensively modded, and the oversampling processor removed. Well, we were all blown away. It was clearly more open, detailed......had more decay versus my Jolida or a Sony 5400. I just assumed the more current chip sets would sound better. What an eye opener.
pdspecl
Along the way of realizing that good sound is timeless, I've also stopped worrying about keeping up with the latest technology. One CD player I own never really garnered much attention when it was offered, and as I have rediscovered it, find myself enjoying it more than some of the expensive machines I own.
Ghost - Thanks for the history, but I'm aware of it.

Many D/A chips do not give you the choice of avoiding the digital filtering, so the D/A chip does force this much of the time, and they auto-select the filter for each sample-rate. This simply sounds bad, not so much because of the digital filtering, because the digital filter implementations are so poor. If these were ideal, it would be great and the NOS DACs would not have such a following IMO.

But we live in a non-ideal world. I personally have had mostly poor audio experiences with typical digital filtering. This is why I made it selectable in my own DAC design. It is better IME to use more analog filtering instead.

However, I recently heard a DAC that had reasonable digital filter design, and that is the W4S DAC2 using the Sabre chip. This was using the I2S input on it driven from an Off-Ramp. World-Class SQ.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Elberoth - the Metrum Octave is a great piece. Many of my customers have one, but they also tell me that many of them cannot playback 176.4 or 192. Does yours?

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Some of the newer DACs have addressed the pre/post-ringing in the impulse response with minimum phase and apodizing filters. Ayre, with the Wolfram chip, documents that well. SACD also got that much improved. Another star goes to the dithered digital volume control of Audiolab, Amarra and probably others, which often depend on upsampling.

Helped play around with DIY NOS DACs (stacking was the trend back then) with friends and while many people that listened thought it was better, I thought it was "romantic" sounding and less than honest although it was impossible to explain how. Haven't heard much of the commercial NOS products.
Yes, I'm the lucky one - mine does 192kHz, no problem. Waiting for the HEX now.