Yeah, I find the Octave to be interesting. However most of the impressions I've read call it natural and warm. Not sure if warm is the quality I'm looking for in a DAC. At least not in my primary listening device.

Also nowadays the DIY scene in general has got too lazy to come up with good complex DAC devices. I mean in signal conversion there is no Gainclone or the Wire. Lately I've been trawling the Russian/post-soviet bloc DIY forums and honestly I was mindblown. Sure, the headphone scene is still in its diapers but DAC and speaker designs are vastly more complex (and interesting) compared to most of the Diyaudio stuff. Don't get me wrong- there are good designs at diyaudio but most of the talk is about more pedestrian designs or rather- the parroting of these designs. Here's an example of what the Russians are up to-

There are a few modern consumer DACs doing this now.  The Metrum Octave is one fairly popular cheapish option.  6Moons is pushing the Totaldac, which means stay away from it.  The one that interests me is the MSB Analog Dac, but I'm going to wait until its available on the used market.

I've also seen some PCM1704 DACs claiming 192Khz capability. That means reducing the amount of oversampling from the normal 8 to 4 to stay within the 1704's maximum frequency limit. Supposedly the 1704 sounds considerably worse with 4X OS, so I would probably avoid those DACs.

Quote from: Tari on September 23, 2012, 04:01:59 PM

There are a few modern consumer DACs doing this now.  The Metrum Octave is one fairly popular cheapish option.  6Moons is pushing the Totaldac, which means stay away from it.  The one that interests me is the MSB Analog Dac, but I'm going to wait until its available on the used market.

I've also seen some PCM1704 DACs claiming 192Khz capability. That means reducing the amount of oversampling from the normal 8 to 4 to stay within the 1704's maximum frequency limit. Supposedly the 1704 sounds considerably worse with 4X OS, so I would probably avoid those DACs.

My Cantata does 24/192 and it uses dual 1704's.  I don't notice any degradation, but then again my hirez is about 90% 24/96 and 88.1.  I'll have to test it out more thoroughly some time.

The Russians are making an overly complex design based on twenty-year-old DAC chips? Sounds about right

This guy has many designs available online. Some based on newer delta-sigmas, others on older multibits. Every design has a paper that explains what technological or acoustic problems he intends to tackle and how/why he has chosen to do so. Additionally there are schematics and measurements provided along with short subjective evaluations of sound. Maybe someday I'll translate some of them in English.

One of the local guys repeated one of the DACs and got pretty similar (and respectable) measurements out of it. http://www.elfaforums.lv/threads/5310-DAC-AD1853-(DUAL-MONO)-LYNX-D29V3

All in all my rant was that the DIY community isn't pushing the technological boundries of what's possible. I'm not saying that complex means good, then again I don't subscribe to the "only the most complex can comprehend the simple" mantra. I choose what I build according to what I can learn from building, not by how much money can I save compared to commercial offerings.

All in all my rant was that the DIY community isn't pushing the technological boundries of what's possible. I'm not saying that complex means good, then again I don't subscribe to the "only the most complex can comprehend the simple" mantra. I choose what I build according to what I can learn from building, not by how much money can I save compared to commercial offerings.

Cool and I meant no disrespect to the design or the complexity. It just hit me as a stereotypically Russian approach to a situation, kind of like seeing an in-dash DVD player mounted in a forty-year-old Volga.