Hi there,
You did not say it explicitly but I must assume you meant a comparison between the Phasure NOS1(a) and the SpringDAC. But to be honest, I don't think anyone compared because there's insufficient availability ?
and what is perceived to be the audible difference?
Can't answer that as well as most probably I am heavily biased. No, but seriously, there's a bit (pun) more going on than having precisely trimmed ladders/resistors. I mean, having a discrete D/A converter seems to be "the ultimate" (I designed one myself -
Re: Phasure NOS2) but in practice it won't be able to cope with the precision of the very much smaller package (we call that a chip
).
Btw, this is not related to the trimming, because my design did that too. And you know what ? this is moot when within seconds all already changes not because of environmental temperature changes, but because the resistors themselves heat up (and will show a different resistance because of that) while they are not all used at the same time (and thus also not as long and thus the one heats up more than the other).
Let's remember that for a 24 bit resolviong DAC one needs 0.000002% resistor precision (and what we can buy is 0.001% at best - maybe 0.0005%)).
So am I biased ? of course. But only from experience.
Btw, the NOS1
a resolves to ~23.5 bits. Measurements of that are up somewhere in here.
Of course this is all outside of how a DAC may sound. And you really would not be the first who likes a bit (or a pile) of distortion better than without or way less. But it is not my still as it (an aim for distortion) is nothing to "develop with".
Thanks and best regards,
Peter
