What are the deciding factor of a high performance DAC?

As a fellow fan of Yanni, have you seen his Voices concert? I think it's his best show ever. Hard to believe it was almost 10 years ago.
 
Happy Hopping said:
So your Paradigm Persona B which uses the Be tweeter. What's your opinion of your speaker? are you happy w/ the sound performance?
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They have a slightly W shaped frequency response that needs to be corrected, but after you do they sound a lot like the Focal Utopia headphones. Very fast, extremely sharp transients, but slightly metallic sound which I believe is a consequence of the little amount of distortion coming through primarily being in the odd order type. I'm not entirely sure they are my end game speaker, as it's something that's hyper detailed, a sound that keeps you wide awake while listening to them.

Two other monitors I compared them to, the Dynaudio Confidence Platinums and the Salk Silk Monitors, which use soft dome fabric & paper drivers, are detailed while sounding laid back at the same time, due to the much superior damping of those materials compared to Be I suspect.

Two speakers I'm most interested in comparing the Persona Bs to will be the Revel Performa3 M126Be ($4k--1" Be and 6.5" Ceramic mid) and the Ascend Acoustics Sierra Diamond ($7.5k--1" Diamond and 6" woven poly cone Seas Excel drivers) with both speakers coming out around April this year. The tweeter and woofer is a high end kit that Seas developed to be used together. The Seas T29D001 seems to be the consensus best tweeter in the world (should be for that price) and I want to see if it really does blow away Materon Truextent Be domes, and I'm curious if Seas can build a flagship woven poly cone with fancy magnets and surrounds that can close to gap or keep up with a Be or Ceramic woofer.

I'll be using Dirac Live's impulse response correction to make sure all the drivers are phase aligned and that should eliminate any advantage based on crossover implementation (drivers wired out of phase or lower order crossovers).
 
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those "metallic sound", on what circumstance did you hear them? what music do you listen to get those sound? and how often are we talking about?
 
Commander Shepard said:
As a fellow fan of Yanni, have you seen his Voices concert? I think it's his best show ever. Hard to believe it was almost 10 years ago.
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haven't go to any concert of anyone since 1999. How much is a concert ticket nowadays? I used to pay $30 for a celine dion concert

I'm not happy w/ his K2HD, Live At The Acropolis, there is no sound effect difference vs. the regular CD ver. I paid good $ for that K2HD
 
Voices show was in Acapulco. Pick up the DVD. Much better than Acropolis, especially if you like vocals.
 
pippenainteasy said:
I have a Paradigm Persona B with a 7" Be woofer and 1" Be tweeter I will be comparing it to, it will be interesting to see which one has better mids.

The FR chart you listed is for Adam A7X?
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1 other quick question: Compare your Paradigm Persona B, to say M Audio M3-8, how would you describe the improvement? Because the price is almost 10X, so there must be a sizeable performance difference
 
Happy Hopping said:
those "metallic sound", on what circumstance did you hear them? what music do you listen to get those sound? and how often are we talking about?
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Percussion instruments have a lot of twang to them, wind instruments seem just a tad sharper than on paper or fabric drivers like the Salk Silk Monitor or Dynaudio C1. This is even after EQed to the same target curve and impulse correction using Dirac Live. I don't go to a lot of live performances, so it's *possible* that this is actually a more accurate representation of the music, but I actually think I prefer the softer sound of doped fabric or paper for long term listening and how the transients just don't sound as sharp. However it does an amazing rendition acoustic guitar where you can hear the extended draw of every string, it just seems somewhat fatiguing over time.

I've never heard the M Audio M3-8, so I can't comment directly on how they would compare. But I can comment on the following:

First, there are diminishing returns obviously in audio.

Secondly, the M-Audio loudspeaker is designed for nearfield listening, whereas most hifi speakers these days have acoustic lens, waveguides, etc, designed to provide controlled directivity of the drive units at midfield+ listening distances.

Thirdly, more expensive speakers are typically chasing some kind of exotic driver material in order to push resonances above audibility. The M-Audios use kevlar drivers for their midrange. Midrange (5-7 inch) kevlar, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, carbon fiber; the most common materials, all have some sort of major resonances between 3-6KHz. Top of the line speakers will typically use something much costlier like ceramic, beryllium, diamond, or some special composite in order achieve high performance without a driver that's prone to ringing or bending within it's audible band.
 
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pippenainteasy said:
The best of both worlds is to buy a high end passive speaker, take out the crossover, replace it with active crossovers like DEQX, and use your own amps. Now you have an active system with better drivers than what is available with pro audio equipment, but the same performance advantages of active DSP and crossovers.
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I'm re-reading the above. Name 1 person in the world who would take out a good pair of Sonus Faber or your friend Tidal Audio, and screw around w/ the inside.

Seriously?
 
Happy Hopping said:
I'm re-reading the above. Name 1 person in the world who would take out a good pair of Sonus Faber or your friend Tidal Audio, and screw around w/ the inside.

Seriously?
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I don't know anyone personally who owns the tidals, or any Sonus Faber speakers, so I can't make that specific claim.

The general principle has been done before, if it hadn't companies like Deqx would not exist, nor any of a number of companies which sell external digital crossover units.

If you meant to say name someone famous who has done something similar, I believe this is what the mixing engineer Bob Katz did with his Dynaudio Evidence system.
 
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Happy Hopping said:
I'm re-reading the above. Name 1 person in the world who would take out a good pair of Sonus Faber or your friend Tidal Audio, and screw around w/ the inside.

Seriously?
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At some point I plan on converting my MartinLogan EM ESL's to active. I have a measurement mic so it shouldn't be too difficult.
 
At the very least, you need to drill a rectangle w/ trianglular edges to plug in the power cord. Anyhoo, I wonder if there is any website who do this kind of custom work on high end speaker, converting 3 WAY passive to active
 
Happy Hopping said:
At the very least, you need to drill a rectangle w/ trianglular edges to plug in the power cord. Anyhoo, I wonder if there is any website who do this kind of custom work on high end speaker, converting 3 WAY passive to active
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Nah just add an extra pair of speaker posts. All amps and active Xovers will be external. I doubt someone could run a business like that. Lots of stuffy old audiophiles don't really like active or modifying speakers in productive ways (they like replacing caps and wire ugh). You find active more on the studio monitor or DIY fronts.
 
Happy Hopping said:
At the very least, you need to drill a rectangle w/ trianglular edges to plug in the power cord. Anyhoo, I wonder if there is any website who do this kind of custom work on high end speaker, converting 3 WAY passive to active
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Quite easy to do active with external amps. Although it’d be much more elegant with say an icepower amp implemented.
 
I won't know how to do it. At the back of my active speaker, I have 5 knobs that covers vol. control, vol. control Low, Mid, High, and EQ. This has to be professional build. And at youtube, there is only 1 hit on this, and it's a crappy amateur build
 
The extra power is kind of moot but the ‘s are selling you on less marketing versus the Focals and they look to have a great line up.

The craftsmanship location doesn’t mean much, just depends on how the speaker was engineered. I’m sure the company has excellent engineers.
 
I can't find any review on the BM brand via google search engine. So I don't know how good they are. This brand is not a common brand. Youtube also doesn't have much
 
I've heard a lot of high-end gear back in my Head-Fi days, going to meets. Nowaways I run squeezeboxes via raspberry pi with audio hats. The sound quality you get out of this little guy is honestly pretty shocking.
 
Trimlock said:
I have a feeling you are going to like the 6.5" ceramic more, smaller cone, and most likely better damped. I find typically 7"s are good for mids but do much better lower (bass region), I think the sweet spot for the 2k region is 5" drivers how ever.


lol that's what I get for talking shit.

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Well I ended up keeping the Revel M126BE and selling the Paradigm Persona B. So yes you were right, I ended up preferring the ceramic cone more :)
 
pippenainteasy said:
Well I ended up keeping the Revel M126BE and selling the Paradigm Persona B. So yes you were right, I ended up preferring the ceramic cone more :)
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those are becoming a real favorite among music listeners. Thanks for coming back and letting me know!
 
Happy Hopping said:
Because the price is almost 10X, so there must be a sizeable performance difference
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I know this is old, but someone else woke this thread up first so here I go. If you think just because something is significantly more expensive that it must be significantly better, then I've got some really really expensive HDMI cables to sell you. They come with a bonus free bridge.
 
sinisterDei said:
I know this is old, but someone else woke this thread up first so here I go. If you think just because something is significantly more expensive that it must be significantly better, then I've got some really really expensive HDMI cables to sell you. They come with a bonus free bridge.
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Agreed. There is so much car priced audio jewelry out there with fancy high quality materials and shiny bezels with no distinguishable sound difference from much cheaper hardware, and in some cases the more expensive stuff actually sounds worse.

Two things are at play here:

1.) Just because a company markets itself as premium, and can design a fancy box for their DAC/AMP/Speakers/whatever with premium materials, doesn't mean that they are better sound engineers, or even care about creating better sound. They know that most of their customers will never know the difference anyway. Gold plate a turd, and it's still a turd, but now it's an expensive turd you can show off to your friends and feel impressive.

2.) Even if the higher price correlated strictly with the amount of talent/skill/effort that went into designing the audio pathway of a set of speakers/DAC/AMP, you rather quickly hit the level of rather steeply diminishing returns. In other words, the more you spend, the less difference each incremental dollar makes. In general, if you shop smartly and do your research, cheap stuff can sound very good. For two channel audio, there would be no need to turn your nose up at a cheap $200-$300 setup for speakers, sub and amp. An argument can be made for improvement in quality going up to about $1000 for a set of speakers and amp and a sub, but spending much more than that is probably not going to gain you much, if anything, other than satisfaction knowing that you have spent money on "premium" gear.

One thing that people who are into audio hardware hate to hear is that in general their hardware, whether its a DAC an amp or their speakers makes less of a difference than their environment. The room (size, shape, hard reflective vs absorbent soft surfaces, etc.), and the setup of the hardware you have (position of speakers, not too close to walls/corners, position of listener, not too close to walls/corners, speaker angles, crossovers, etc.) makes a MUCH larger difference than spending more money on audio hardware.

Sometimes, if for instance your listening room has hardwood floors, the best thing you can do for your money to get better sound, is not to buy a new amp, new speakers or a new DAC, but rather to buy a rug.

That said, the general rule of thumb is, if you want to spend money on audio hardware, spend it on good transducers (speakers / headphones) first. This makes by far the biggest difference. After that, make sure you have an AMP that can properly drive them. The least important part, that makes the least difference is the DAC.
 
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