Tuesday, June 3, 2014

The superiority of ladder DAC's

Here's another essay on the superiority of ladder DAC's.

At the 2014 Newport T.H.E. Show, two exhibits had ladder DAC: MSB and Audio Note.  They both seemed to have superior resolution to other systems, except for 15 IPS tape used for the MSB Extreme system.  (Other tape systems shown were not as good as the UHA--by far.)

Curiously MSB used cheap speakers, nevertheless achieved Class B performance.  Audio Note was Class C, likely because of high distortion SET amplification and NOS, it sounded a bit harsh.  (When I previously heard Audio Note at the 2009 T.H.E Show in Las Vegas, I put it in Class F--very harsh sounding.  Ironically, that was the top end Audio Note system of the time, whereas the 2014 T.H.E. show had a mid level Audio Note system--which I thought sounded better.)  Also, I believe that No-Oversamping-Or-Filtering is a bad approach which leads to harshness.

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