Hello friends
When I shifted to stereo audio from ICE all I wanted to buy was an all in one player like Oppo205 and active speakers like ATC SCM40A. But now I have ended up with 8-9 boxes and thinking of adding one more. I was also of the opinion that keeping the music files in the shortest possible journey to DAC from source is the way to go to avoid it being degraded due to noise and other unknown (to me) problems.
But now I would like to add a DDC between my DAC and custom-built computer audio transport. There are two reasons for that, first is the poor USB input implementation in my otherwise great-sounding Metrum acoustics Adagio DAC as compared to other inputs as per the folks who have knowledge about these DACs. 2nd reason is that I am not happy with the sound as compared with the sound from the Marantz SA10 SACD player.
But coz I was a bit skeptical about the claims of these DDCs I wanted to try a cheaper/used piece before I move to a higher-end model. The plan was to avoid the use of noisy USB input on Metrum and use AES input instead. That's is when I came across a very humble FM selling his Gustard U12. Immediately I bought it and installed it between DAC and transport. But ap-Linux 4 installed on transport did not recognize U12 which was kind of expected. This is how this OS has behaved ever since it was installed last year.
Last weekend, after about a month I tried again, and not to my surprise this time it was recognized by ap-Linux. The sound which I heard though surprised me a lot. U12 is an entry-level DDC and there are much better DDC available in the market but true to online reviews it performed exceptionally well in my system.
The first thing I noticed was an improvement in the upper range which was a bit lacking earlier. So it sounded a bit more detailed without the change in overall timbre. The second but less obvious was the improvement in overall refinement. This difference was subtle though and needed a bit more time to come to the conclusion.
Sometimes we have to compare various pieces of equipment just to know the difference and keep "improving" our system. So now I have also found a way to better my system with a relatively inexpensive upgrade otherwise, I was planning to buy either Aurender N10, dCS network bridge, Aurelic G2, Innuos Zenith or Lumin U1 as a source feeding to DAC. So I plan to save close to $5K.
So now either Denafrips GAIA/Hermes or Audio-gd DI-20HE are on my want to buy list. Both are having good user reviews to back these products. I will have to buy the i2S module for Matrum DAC to make full use of this output from both DDCs. In the coming days, I will be reading more reviews and hopefully placing an order within a few weeks.
Thanks for reading guys.
Rest of components in the chain:
EAR 868 preamp
Threshold SA1 monoblocks
Focal Electra 1038 BE
When I shifted to stereo audio from ICE all I wanted to buy was an all in one player like Oppo205 and active speakers like ATC SCM40A. But now I have ended up with 8-9 boxes and thinking of adding one more. I was also of the opinion that keeping the music files in the shortest possible journey to DAC from source is the way to go to avoid it being degraded due to noise and other unknown (to me) problems.
But now I would like to add a DDC between my DAC and custom-built computer audio transport. There are two reasons for that, first is the poor USB input implementation in my otherwise great-sounding Metrum acoustics Adagio DAC as compared to other inputs as per the folks who have knowledge about these DACs. 2nd reason is that I am not happy with the sound as compared with the sound from the Marantz SA10 SACD player.
But coz I was a bit skeptical about the claims of these DDCs I wanted to try a cheaper/used piece before I move to a higher-end model. The plan was to avoid the use of noisy USB input on Metrum and use AES input instead. That's is when I came across a very humble FM selling his Gustard U12. Immediately I bought it and installed it between DAC and transport. But ap-Linux 4 installed on transport did not recognize U12 which was kind of expected. This is how this OS has behaved ever since it was installed last year.
Last weekend, after about a month I tried again, and not to my surprise this time it was recognized by ap-Linux. The sound which I heard though surprised me a lot. U12 is an entry-level DDC and there are much better DDC available in the market but true to online reviews it performed exceptionally well in my system.
The first thing I noticed was an improvement in the upper range which was a bit lacking earlier. So it sounded a bit more detailed without the change in overall timbre. The second but less obvious was the improvement in overall refinement. This difference was subtle though and needed a bit more time to come to the conclusion.
Sometimes we have to compare various pieces of equipment just to know the difference and keep "improving" our system. So now I have also found a way to better my system with a relatively inexpensive upgrade otherwise, I was planning to buy either Aurender N10, dCS network bridge, Aurelic G2, Innuos Zenith or Lumin U1 as a source feeding to DAC. So I plan to save close to $5K.
So now either Denafrips GAIA/Hermes or Audio-gd DI-20HE are on my want to buy list. Both are having good user reviews to back these products. I will have to buy the i2S module for Matrum DAC to make full use of this output from both DDCs. In the coming days, I will be reading more reviews and hopefully placing an order within a few weeks.
Thanks for reading guys.
Rest of components in the chain:
EAR 868 preamp
Threshold SA1 monoblocks
Focal Electra 1038 BE
