I have been around long enough to know what smell like roses over there, could be some what wilted here, but at the price its hard to pass up for a play. One of the problems for me is Mark has changed the great valves that the Kdac was tuned around. He has chosen valves that really do sound very ordinary here. But as Mark said, he feels they suited his system. I will have to try one of these Dacs here first.
Steve, at this stage, in my mind at least, I think we are past the point of you being the final arbiter on whether the Line Magnetics / Sabre can cut the mustard on any
bodies system.
Brian and Mark have already proven that it is at least in the ballpark of a KillerDAC performance wise. They have both had versions of the KD and
if the KD lives or dies on a pair of OP tubes - well I hate to say it but your argument is looking pretty thin - read on.
I have already looked at close ups of the LM DAC and know quite a bit of it's implementation. I can say without doubt that there is substantial room for
improvement beyond the usual tweaks of changing wires, resistors and caps.
However, as I have also stated here in the past, Sabre is much like a sports car DAC that has a lot going on inside and requires special attention in many areas.
Listening to a standard one will be meaningless. So I really need to Listen to this modified version,
I don't really get where you are coming from here either. If you can critically listen to bits of 1" long wire and individual resistors then you should be able
to hear the potential of a DAC.
I don't have golden ears but I certainly easily heard the -potential- of my Sabre 9008 (older) DAC even though it is off the pace by quite a margin it does
many things fundamentally very well. Maybe as already suggested, we have too many vested interests here, be they financial, egotistical or whatever, as
soon as a Sabre based DAC comes along, the main players focus on what it -doesn't- do well and slander it.
My approach was the opposite and I listened to what it -does- do well and I found many fundamentally great things.
Once you add up the other benefits such as high rez PCM and high speed DSD compatibility, it has a lot going for it.
If it is better than mine here, well when the new model plays DSD am going to buy one and mod it. One word of warning, My KillerDac is at the top of its game, so finely tuned it is just amazing. Do I expect Bryans modified Dac to be better.....in some ways yes. Most good Dac are in some ways better. My gut feeling is in the areas that matter to me..... NO. Time will tell. It's fun times in audio guys. PS, Apparently Gamve and plasma guy have kissed and made up. Good, again all is quite on the western front.
Overall, IMV there's no question, the Sabre is -potentially- a more capable DAC than the 1541, but as I have stated before it is a very complex beast and you won't
get the absolute best out of it by doing the usual tweak tricks. It is a very different animal to the 1541 and requires a different approach. The 1541 is comparatively
slow running at clock speeds around 1/10th of the Sabre. It also is mostly class A transistor inside with low noise. The Sabre is high speed cmos = high speed
RF noise.
I am sure you will get reasonably good results with tweaking but to really extract top performance from this chip is like tuning a Ferrari. It requires
a lot of knowledge of it's design parameters and a complete circuit board up approach. It's no trivial task.
Terry
