Located in Silicon Valley, our dedicated engineers and production specialists work to bring you the best in high-end audio. Combining elegant design thinking with a passion for lifelike reproduction, our close-knit team, led by brothers Jonathan and Daniel Gullman, build and curate a wide array of hifi products-DACs, transports and amplifiers-setting an industry benchmark. By relying on tight integration between electrical, mechanical and consumer needs, we strive to push the listening experience further. At the end of the day, our joy comes from innovation and sharing our leading-edge technologies with the world.
Designing DACs for more than 25 years has given us keen insights for future ready products. Now, more than ever, our product range has the most flexible architechture yet. California based in-house development and manufacturing has evolved the digital front-end to a new level of playback.
We have the Estelon Forza and Magico M2 currently. We also have some in-house designed speakers to help with development of new products. We would have more on hand, but California real estate makes storing large loudspeakers difficult.
@@DanielGullmanFrancis Thank you for sharing it. When the sound of your Cascade DAC was described, I thought it would match well with low distortion and high bandwidth speakers like Magico.
@@DanielGullmanFrancis That must sound amazing, literally. Well, both of you are in a position to make a barter exchange. I hope M7 will be coming to your demo room soon.
I see a lot of nice touches and details here but at the same time a few things seem quite disappointing: 1. After having mentioned several ways of how they were able to cut down costs (e.g. maximize use of LEDs without any waste, getting 3 instead of 2 blocks for the same costs in chassis) all the key parts of the system seem to be exactly what used to be in the outgoing models. From an enduser perspective it seems like price indeed just went up by 20k from the old 3-box reference solution but since the sonic gains of separating the rather noisy digital section put it sonically above the old select II it works out marketing wise that "cost has been cut down for the end user". They clearly say that all these things stayed the same, just a complete redesign to put everything into different places. 2. It actually shows how much damage all the digital processing, from upsampling to all those digital filters actually does compared to NOS R2R DACs which simply don't produce all that noise in the first place. The whole cost of digital creator chassis on top of that is also necessary while having to live with the artefacts introduced in the digital processing. There is a reason it's called noise shaping. One may only try to mitigate the negative effects as much as possible when going down this approach (which MSB seems to be doing probably the best job out there right now in the industry) but it questions the viability of this whole approach in general. Every single processing step introduces some delays in the critical time domain (jitter) and while this DAC certainly does as much as possible at the highest level to mitigate this it makes the overal approach questionable. There is a reason a lot of other highend DACs intentionally chose to go for NOS R2R. 3. The massive power supply section is using heavy filtering to make the measurements "really good" and "calm everything down". Massive filtering exactly does this, like has been seen on all those massive filtering AC conditioners in the past. This approach harms a key concept of a good system, the dynamics are compromised. There has been a huge shift in how many top hifi companies approach good power and that's why we have so many highend passive power delivery systems which intentionally don't put massive capacitors and such into the path but instead rely on passive filtering effects which keeps all the good stuff in place only killing the noise. Just look at what Ansuz Mainz does in their power distributors or Boenicke Audio among so many others. Many people get rid of their active filtering power conditioners or distributors (in which they do active filtering like this, so basically the same) to get their dynamics back. I don't doubt for a single second that the noise floor is really low, it's calm, smooth and measures like crazy. But did you also measure dynamics? I am not sold on this massive active filtering I see here. Transients is what make music alive and believable after all, not single note pitches. Can someone from MSB maybe go into detail on the cost side of things and why they use this approach of going nuts on digital processing and the way they filter the power with those massive capacitors? It seems like a mixed bag of some sort. On the one hand some pretty crazy engineering and attention to details is put in but the approach seems to introduce tons of issues which then have to be all solved really well. Tidal Audio intentinoally using NOS R2R and don't filter in their crazy Tidal for Bugatti DAC, SW1X is not doing it in their DAC X silver for 140k, Lampizator Horizon is not even dreaming of it, Stavros Danos from Aries Cerat explained in intervies why they believe that this should not be done and can be seen in their whole lineup not only in their Ithaka and Homerus DACs. These types of products sound extremely dynamic. I would love to see a section going into details on why they actually choose their approach.
@OCDHIFiGuy have you heard the new Cascade DAC? If yes, how does the MPD-8 compare? The Cascade seems to offer a much more emotional experience over the Select DAC.
There are two possibilities here: either this DAC is indeed needed for a true to source representation, in which case this hobby sucks since you need 100K in order to listen to some good sound quality music, or this DAC is not actually needed and can't surpass normal (priced) DACs in terms of SQ, in which case you gotta be nuts to pay such a premium price just for the looks. Either way, it is not OK for a DAC to cost this much.
People make DAC's because they can't fix loudspeaker problems. Problems with loudspeakers are the most difficult to fix which is why companies like this make products that pretend to solve lots of problems when the problems in loudspeakers still exist no matter how expensive their DACs are !!
@@DanielGullmanFrancis How does your expensive DAC and amps fix loudspeaker problems ?? From what I can see, all you are doing is selling expensive ice to an eskimo.
@@Jay-eo3wl And that comment makes no sense either because a speaker converts electrical energy into acoustical energy which is what you hear. Find me one speaker that does its conversion better or more transparently than even the cheapest of DACs ?? I bet you can't ;)
@@Jay-eo3wl And of course the more expensive DAC with the more expensive CNC milled out case always happens to be the best :D LOL Like I said show me one speaker that is more transparent than the cheapest of DACs available ? To help you along a bit it should have a flat frequency response within +/-0.02dB from 20Hz to 20kHz. Ultra low distortion of at least 0.001%. Flat or linear phase response from 20Hz to 20KHz. Huge dynamic range of at least 120dB ;) Any contenders ??
@@Jay-eo3wl You can't address the real issue can you. I'll make it easy for you. Get your yourself a cheap transistor radio with its 2 inch speaker and power that speaker with this dudes megabuck dac and megaback amplifer and what do you hear ?? Now get yourself a cheap Topping DAC and a cheap amplifier of reasonable quality and then connect that up to a speaker of the same value as this dudes dac and amplifier. Which sounds better ?? And this is the reason why you should always throw most of your money at the weakest link in the chain which is still the loudspeaker by a long shot otherwise you are just fiddling around the edges ;)
There are already so many good DACs out there at a lower price. This is our specialty, but please check out the broader market. It is a golden age for digital products.
The production quality looks excellent. I'm really interested in the difference in sound quality compared to the 1000-1500€ dac. I wonder if all the engineering effort really makes a huge difference in sound quality?
Will I be able to choose a sound profile like analytical/neutral/musical? Not all listeners have the same favorite characteristic in music reproduction.
Hello. The Cascade will not have this option, but you have several avenues to pursue this. First, I will say why not all three? The Cascade doesn't have to sacrifice one of those for the others. You can also get a music player that will process the files before playback to show your specific characteristics. And then, probably most common, is speaker preference. Speakers often decide the "feel" of a system. We have Magicos and Estelon speakers in our listening room and these two show very different performances.
Of course! There are only three of us doing this engineering work, so it will take some time ;) For now, the manufacturing improvements are fighting inflation and increased cost of materials.
We do have a network renderer, but will never create a server. The lifespan of servers is quite short lived. We are a small company that wants to focus on long lasting digital. This way, people can choose the software experience they like best with their favored server.
I hope to own the MSB primer headphone setup one day. Keep up the great work, and please have more dealers in Sydney, impossible to find them for demo.
@@DanielGullmanFrancis one the biggest factors in matching a preamp to a power amp is the impedance. It would be great if MBS let users select the desired output impedance like CH Precision.
@@klaymoon1 We designed our amplifiers to have selectable impedance instead of the DAC. In this case, the impedance is driven by the DAC modules directly so we didn't interfere with purity of the signal.
@@DanielGullmanFrancis It makes sense not comprising the signal there unnecessarily. However, unfortunately this means that for anyone interested in using this DAC with power amps of any other brand can easily run into matching problems since power amps don't typically have this feature. So it's a system that has only been designed to be used as a full MSB chain.
@@andreas7278 Thanks for the feedback, I think the inverse is more true for our preamp. It can easily drives most amps and will run into a few outliers that would be better with a preamp. There can’t be a “do all” design that plays well with everything, so we designed what we thought was best for the most people possible. The results speak for themselves.
Wonderful. Can't wait to hear it. I just auditioned a Premier in my system and was fairly blown away. I have a DCS Vivaldi Apex now and couldn't believe first that the Premier was indeed better, and then that it was so much better in almost every way. This was in my system and to my ears, of course, ymmv.
Awesome to hear! I use the Premier DAC in my system, but I may upgrade to the Cascade as soon as we have a demo unit available... The Premier DAC is so very excellent, were you using a digital director with it as well?
This next gen DAC is aimed to replace the Reference Series DAC and the upcoming Sentinel DAC will replace the Select Series DAC as our new flagship. Both of these new DACs outperform anything we have done before.
Problem with MSB they make you pay 💰 too much at the bottom entry point to buy their DACs which after buying the base model you still have to pay 💰 more for basic upgrades. I’ve have listened to them multiple times and it is a love it hate thing. Now the TOTL was pretty impressive but basically only the so called 1% can buy them.
Thanks for the feedback, it is something we are working on. Our goal is to include more features up front so the upgrades don't add up. Our older sales models had everything customizable, and it really was getting out of hand. It was expensive and difficult to support so many options.
$95K ? If so, I would rather buy 2 SUV's. Perfect example of the madness of high end audio... There is NO WAY the engineering of a DAC is more complicated than the engineering of an automobile...
The market supports it though. There are lots of wealthy people in the world who think 100K is chump change. God bless them. They probably worked very hard to get where they are. I'm more of a 25K DAC guy myself. Works for me. : )
Very smart design! I do like the Select II look better, but nice to further isolate the digital processes, and reduce the number of PSUs in the system (vs with Director).
GM☕️👍 I admire this setup..tho I personally can do without the preamplifier … Now if you could only break that price point …I just got my probable last DAC ..so I’m good . Great unit , I wish you continued success 🥂
@@DanielGullmanFrancis my work schedule does not permit it. Possibly I might request a demo from your dealers when I visit the west coast on a holiday.
Hello, from an engineer prospective you didn't mention anything in regards of improvements. Moving away digitial and analogue section may sound great for some people, but there are many good highend examples out there saying exactly the opposite: keeping everything as close/short as possible. Keeping transformers, toroidal isolated does every DAC, even for 2k ... so I hope just having new display, fancy feets and adding another box is NOT the most innovation 😉
I think that argument goes more for clocks. IMO it's always a benefit to get digital noise out of the DAC. My experience the more stuff crammed into a DAC, the worse it sounds.
I hear you. We will have a longer form breakdown video coming out in the next few weeks. Take a deeper look inside and see if we can convince you. We do avoid publishing measurements as they are easy to manipulate. As engineers know, you can make a graph or chart convince anyone of anything. Plus, I won't deny there are a lot of great electronics out there for 2K. We are doing something different for the folks who want the same thing we are interested in. People are so creative and we love to see the many ways and things they come up with. Enjoy!
Rather than adding a DAC to the top tier, IMO, it would have been smarter to prove you guys can make a better DAC for $10K than anyone else. Of course, only if you were truly confident you have the technical chops to pull it off. Remember, most people logically think most manufacturers with a sky is the limit budget can make a great sounding DAC.
There was the Analog DAC, and the Discrete isn't that far off. I wouldn't say these are absolutely better than anything else in the price range though, because R2R DACs, FPGA/DSD, Delta-Sigma chips all sound different.
@highendaudio, yup, but with a 2nd PSU it's $20K, and it's not appreciably better than other DACs in that $ range. MSB is a good manufacturer and their game is the high end, I get it, but there's an argument to be made that making a killer $10K DAC as a demo of its prowess could be a way to increase brand awareness/sales. Just my 2 cents.
@@michaelmityok1001 the second PSU is $20k? Huh? It’s $1450. Trust me, I sell more MSB than anyone. The Discrete with the second PSU is far better than any other dac in that price range. I’ve had dozens in here: dcs and the like. Even the brightback designs and the moola moola.
Currently, but in the next two years we expect to release The Sentinel DAC, a new flagship. There will be an upgrade path from the Cascade to the Sentinel.
An absolutely high class reference audio device. Stunning, amazing, probably one if not THE best. But seriously, one of the dumbest decision you have could made is to place the Select/ Volume Knob on the top. Weirdest location ever. Out of sight, hardly visible, even more difficult to control. Sure, you can use and operate by RC/App, but thats not the point. Somehow I'd like to control it directly at the device itself too. That for, AVM made a better solution. Veryyyyyy smooth and good response when operating. So, bcs of this case, its certainly just 99% perfect.
Amazing machining process. Your explanation of the process is excellent. I love the fact you explain each aspect very clearly, most videos skip the explanation. Thanks for posting
You can fill the form out on our website for repairs. We can't guarantee a repair on on such a classic piece, but we will certainly try! msbtechnology.com/support/repairs/
One Farad of filter caps? Holy cow, that’s a lot. I bet the transient and dynamics slap hard, and are fast. I take it this amp is tuned for 2nd order harmonics to give it that tube sound….