Phantom Gold DAC

[DSD]

Well we each have our favorites I guess, if money's no object I think the best way is rob watts with chord and make all the decimators, sigma deltas bespoke in the FPGA, but then a a DAVE alone is gonna set you back £7k just for the dac


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[ogs]

Well we each have our favorites I guess, if money's no object I think the best way is rob watts with chord and make all the decimators, sigma deltas bespoke in the FPGA, but then a a DAVE alone is gonna set you back £7k just for the dac


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A proper R2R requires a lot of space, which expert amps or Phantom does not have! Rob Watts' FPGA design might fit, so that is probably what we should wish for. The DAVE is a formidable DAC and a design like that inside Devialet units would be very nice.

[Confused]

It should be noted that Devialet's ADH is PCM, so it will never be possible for an ADH equipped product to have true native DSD capability. As Guillaume mentioned in an earlier post, you would need some kind of conversion prior to ADH, like the Expert's MAT 'DSD Engine'.

As for the quality of the Phantom DAC, I agree with @octaviars earlier post, in that the specification of DAC chip is not as important as you might think. At the 1000 Pro launch event, I was very disappointed to hear Devialet's Matteiu Pernot explain that they basically using the same DAC chip in the Pro as was used in the Expert. Matteiu then went on to explain that this did not matter, and that the actual digital to analogue conversion in the Pro was significantly improved by the new ADH architecture. As to my disappointment in hearing that the DAC chip spec had not changed much, this disappointment vanished once I had an audition of the Pro, which does sound like it has a vastly improved DAC over the Expert. How good? Well, I did a back to back test with a Chord DAVE directly after listening to the Pro, I thought the Pro sounded far more 'real' with better resolution, and as mentioned above, the DAVE is a very fine DAC itself. The Phantom Gold has ADH V2, which I presume (I do not know the detail), moves the Phantom DAC some way in the same technical direction as the Pro.

[ogs]

It should be noted that Devialet's ADH is PCM, so it will never be possible for an ADH equipped product to have true native DSD capability.  As Guillaume mentioned in an earlier post, you would need some kind of conversion prior to ADH, like the Expert's MAT 'DSD Engine'.

As for the quality of the Phantom DAC, I agree with @octaviars earlier post, in that the specification of DAC chip is not as important as you might think.  At the 1000 Pro launch event, I was very disappointed to hear Devialet's Matteiu Pernot explain that they basically using the same DAC chip in the Pro as was used in the Expert.  Matteiu then went on to explain that this did not matter, and that the actual digital to analogue conversion in the Pro was significantly improved by the new ADH architecture.  As to my disappointment in hearing that the DAC chip spec had not changed much, this disappointment vanished once I had an audition of the Pro, which does sound like it has a vastly improved DAC over the Expert.  How good?  Well, I did a back to back test with a Chord DAVE directly after listening to the Pro, I thought the Pro sounded far more 'real' with better resolution, and as mentioned above, the DAVE is a very fine DAC itself.  The Phantom Gold has ADH V2, which I presume (I do not know the detail), moves the Phantom DAC some way in the same technical direction as the Pro.

I would suggest that the reason the current DAC implementation sounds so good is the optimisation Devialet has done around it and the direct connection it has to ADH (and possibly some trickery in the DSP). If Rob Watts' FPGA was an integral part of Devialet's design we would probably have even better sound as Devialet would optimise here too.
This is of course pure speculation as it will never happen.  I agree, the sound of the current DAC is very good. No need to change it.

[f1eng]

It should be noted that Devialet's ADH is PCM, so it will never be possible for an ADH equipped product to have true native DSD capability.  As Guillaume mentioned in an earlier post, you would need some kind of conversion prior to ADH, like the Expert's MAT 'DSD Engine'.

As for the quality of the Phantom DAC, I agree with @octaviars earlier post, in that the specification of DAC chip is not as important as you might think.  At the 1000 Pro launch event, I was very disappointed to hear Devialet's Matteiu Pernot explain that they basically using the same DAC chip in the Pro as was used in the Expert.  Matteiu then went on to explain that this did not matter, and that the actual digital to analogue conversion in the Pro was significantly improved by the new ADH architecture.  As to my disappointment in hearing that the DAC chip spec had not changed much, this disappointment vanished once I had an audition of the Pro, which does sound like it has a vastly improved DAC over the Expert.  How good?  Well, I did a back to back test with a Chord DAVE directly after listening to the Pro, I thought the Pro sounded far more 'real' with better resolution, and as mentioned above, the DAVE is a very fine DAC itself.  The Phantom Gold has ADH V2, which I presume (I do not know the detail), moves the Phantom DAC some way in the same technical direction as the Pro.

Quite so.
OTOH I am not sure that there are any recordings available which have not had at least a PCM>DSD conversion since pretty well anything in editing and mixing is done in PCM.
I would be interested if there does exist a way of editing/mixing a DSD recording without DSD>PCM>DSD conversions. I seem to remember rumours that Sony might be making a DSD capable editing suite, but that may have been dropped due to insufficient interest???

[DSD]

You can do cross fades and edits via sonoma sony or Sadie, but those parts of the bitstream are converted to DSD wide (PCM narrow), so you might say the bitstream is now comprised, however these DAW's retain the 2.8/5.6/11.2 bitrate even when doing the fades. The other alternative is to track/mix in DXD @ 384 and then commit the transcode to bitstream...


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[DSD]

This provenance from NativeDSD for one of their Teleman's should help to explain things; it's imperative you check provenance before purchasing a bitstream album.

This Telemann recording was processed from the original DXD edited master individually to all three DSD bit rates plus the DXD flac, for both stereo and multichannel. The advantage of processing with this method is the elimination of two conversion steps, providing music reproduction closer to the original analog source than previously available.

This process takes advantage of the fact that while virtually all acoustic music labels post process in DXD, they don't actually output a DXD file. They mix down/process in DXD, but output and archive in DSD, usually DSD64. For these labels to offer DSD128 and DSD256, they then convert their DSD64 edited masters to the higher DSD bit rates. Our DXDdirectDSD process skips those unnecessary and to some degree destructive conversion steps by going directly from the DXD processed source individually to the DSD bit rates directly.


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