R2R is NOT dead!!! Having owned a few of this style of dac, I can attest to its "Real" sounding conversion! I haven't heard ANY delta sigmas that sound that good!
This is when marketer and businessman is explaining audio stuff. Add more filters and components makes the sound better, yes, but probably in the parallel universe. Anyone who has heard tda1541, whithout any filters and less components on the sinal path, can't go back to d/s.
I agree with what he said, it’s not just the Chipset used you have to take into account the power supply and board design into account. I don’t think sound can be defined with a broad brush, to each his own
The AKM factory led to Delta sigma DACs being unavailable and this led to a resurgence of R2R? What about ESS, Cirrus Logic, Burr Brown, Texas Instrument, Analogue Device and the other tens on big delta sigma DAC suppliers? It is not that R2R is better either, they are just different and serve a different markets. And yes, critically I "do not pay his bills" :)
Thank you for sharing this with us, definitely some interesting portions in there that I found to be educational, esp surrounding how the clocking works and the dithering etc.
“A cacophony of cultures requiring order and police” that’s some very specific word choice, my man. Did not expect fashy language in my digital audio video.
even if speakers and headphones have high THD, it is possible to hear the difference between a good and bad DAC even if their THD is less than 0.001 %.
there is something missing here though; distorsions can be very different, many types of them. Some can even be considered euphonic, others will tire the ear. R2R distorts very pleasurably. I bet he knows this... Biased presenter, or incomplete... it misses the whole brain part.
I respect the guy’s background and realize it was an entry level discussion but I feel he simplified some of the conclusions quite a bit. His theory that S/D DAC prices are going to come down is flawed. Now that prices have come up, they won’t go down and so they will remain on par with R2R. The majority of costs in DACs is not in the topology it is in all the supplemental components which are the same for others.
I'm not sure what audience would be interested in this but not the maths of it. I suppose that was left out more for time reasons, which is good - can choose which bits to follow up on.
Even though I learned a lot from this guys presentation, he was very clearly biased against R2R tech. I don’t think it’s shocking that Centrance only makes delta-sigma DAC’s.
Never look back after tasted r2r, forget the amir measure freaks as they have severe age hearing damage thus relies on measuring tools to do their hearing. If you don't have hearing damage, you'll hear the difference in sound.
The problem I see is that this presentation is based on the assumption that “better” is based solely on objective measurement of a few metrics. The human brain is not an oscilloscope and better is completely subjective. As we know from tubes, noise may actually be better to many.
R2R is on fire metaphorically speaking... DS is meh IMO.. the future of R2R is shining bright as all of the best new dacs of the last 2 years are R2r. Topping and SMSL all sound the same and are fine for LoFi.
