Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[syndromeofadown]

DACBerry Pro on Kickstarter. It's already funded but still 25 days left to get in on it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oriolsancheza/dacberry-pro-professional-soundcard-for-raspberry

[mwillems]

The 3 watt headphone amp is eye-catching, it's hard to find headphone amps with that kind of juice even at three or four times the price.  If I hadn't already pulled the trigger on an Ifi, I'd get one of these in a heartbeat.

[blgentry]

That spec is hard to verify.  I looked at the spec sheet and saw mono power graphs that ended at about 1 Watt .  Power *dissipation* was 1.6 Watts.  That's how much it's consuming, not output power.  Maybe I didn't read far enough in the sheet.

I guess it's fun to say you have that much power in such a tiny form factor.  But it's chip power.  Which is fine, but chip power isn't usually very "hifi".  If you want hifi power at a low price, the $99 Schiit Magni 2 makes 1.2 W/ch into 32 Ohms and 1.8 W/ch into 16 Ohms.

http://schiit.com/products/magni-2

Which is very respectable and this is a discrete design.  No power chip.

If you want "real big power", then yes, you have to spend more.  The Schiit Lyr2 makes 6 W/ch into 32 Ohms.  But it's also $449; a totally different ballpark.  But if you need that much power, you likely have exotic and *expensive* headphones also.  So you want good quality power to go with them.

Brian.

[Hendrik]

All sorts of DACs claim 32-bit these days, but aren't most DACs only accurate to the mid 20s at best still? Not like anyone could really hear it, but it always seemed misleading to me to claim a 32-bit DAC if it can't actually fully resolve full 32-bit.

[blgentry]

^ Correct.  32 bits is a joke.  Even 24 bits is essentially not resolvable by any DAC that I'm aware of.  22 bits seems to be about the limit for an electrical device that can be currently manufactured. 

Schiit's Yggdrasil achieves 21 bits of measurable resolution and is an extremely sophisticated DAC.  Each channel uses 2 DACs in order to gain another bit (or 1.5 ?) of resolution.

https://schiit.com/products/yggdrasil

24 bits from a low priced DAC is not within the realm of reason, given that ultra expensive DACs can just *barely get over 20 bits of true measured resolution.

Brian.

[mwillems]

That spec is hard to verify.  I looked at the spec sheet and saw mono power graphs that ended at about 1 Watt .  Power *dissipation* was 1.6 Watts.  That's how much it's consuming, not output power.  Maybe I didn't read far enough in the sheet.

I guess it's fun to say you have that much power in such a tiny form factor.  But it's chip power.  Which is fine, but chip power isn't usually very "hifi".  If you want hifi power at a low price, the $99 Schiit Magni 2 makes 1.2 W/ch into 32 Ohms and 1.8 W/ch into 16 Ohms.

http://schiit.com/products/magni-2

Which is very respectable and this is a discrete design.  No power chip.

If you want "real big power", then yes, you have to spend more.  The Schiit Lyr2 makes 6 W/ch into 32 Ohms.  But it's also $449; a totally different ballpark.  But if you need that much power, you likely have exotic and *expensive* headphones also.  So you want good quality power to go with them.

Brian.

No offense to the magni, but there's a world of 1-2 watt portable headphone amps floating around at a reasonable price (the O2 is also respectable in that power range, and fiio makes a 1 watt headphone amp too, etc.).  Once you get into 3-4 watt territory the portable market gets very thin, which is why this caught my eye.  The Lyr looks nice, but I don't think the Lyr is a portable amp, right?

You're right that it looks like this project is fudging the spec on deeper inspection, which is a shame.  Ifi makes a portable battery powered amp/DAC that will put out 4 watts at the high end, which is what I'm currently using.  I need >2 watts to fully drive my magneplanar headphones; the frequency response gets kind of goofy on the low end when driven with a ~1 watt amp.

Magneplanar headphones can be a cruel mistress, and needing an arc-welding headphone amp is a pain, but they're worth it in my opinion.

^ Correct.  32 bits is a joke.  Even 24 bits is essentially not resolvable by any DAC that I'm aware of.  22 bits seems to be about the limit for an electrical device that can be currently manufactured. 

Schiit's Yggdrasil achieves 21 bits of measurable resolution and is an extremely sophisticated DAC.  Each channel uses 2 DACs in order to gain another bit (or 1.5 ?) of resolution.

https://schiit.com/products/yggdrasil

24 bits from a low priced DAC is not within the realm of reason, given that ultra expensive DACs can just *barely get over 20 bits of true measured resolution.

Brian.

And we're unlikely to ever get there either unless there's a revolution in resistor technology.  The Johnson noisefloor from the thermal noise in the passive components at 1KHz is about -144dB (which is more or less exactly 24 bits).  No existing tech gets there because active components are inevitably noisier, but it seems very unlikely we'll ever get real resolution better than 24 bit.

[DarkPenguin]

I also like my current hi-fi berry DAC. But it ends in RCA jacks. I might buy this and put together something for work. Those headphones (ones that I don't mind if my criminal coworkers walk off with) do not require the same power the home ones do.

I like my O2 quite a bit but it definitely runs out of power. (Not a bad thing. Keeps me from going more deaf.) My FIIO has always been shockingly competent for what looks like garbage.

Wouldn't use a schiit for anything more hifi than a doorstop.