GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: Berkeley Audio Design's Alfa Reference DAC.

Post Subject: You make it difficult to reply when you grind your axesPosted by anthony on: 9/4/2014

Hi Romy,

I have never had a particularly good listen to a Berkeley dac so I cannot comment there, but I do appreciate the steps they have taken to remove some processing from the dac itself and give the computer some more work to do.

Personally, I am a fan of NOS dacs that rely on the computer to do some of the heavy lifting such as upsampling and applying the digital filter. This makes the dac itself much simpler and more likely a master of its intended task. I've compared my Redbook specialist dac to a number of other well regarded dacs including some that are considered at or near the top of the DSD pile, and Redbook can certainly sound more correct and interesting than DSD. My experience is that the quality of the dac is much more important than the music storage format.

I've not heard the PM2 but Mani who posts here from time to time has one which has been relegated to ADC duties only by his Redbook specialist dac (the same model as my dac).

Cheers,

Anthony

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