It's here! Haven't had a chance to do a "product shot" yet... coming. Here's a stock picture:
And the manufacturer's page:
:text-link:
It's got coax, optical, aes/ebu, and USB inputs. It's capable of decoding DSD, and PCM up to 32bit/384kHz. It uses the ESS Sabre32 DAC chip, which is the same one Oppo uses in the BDP-105 and the HA-1 (their new headphone DAC/amp).
Preliminary opinion, after listening to my demo tracks with DA8 as DAC only (it has a built in amp which you can switch off to improve S/N of the DAC), along with my Woo WA6 and Denon D5000: really nice, a noticeable - albeit not ENORMOUS - step up from my previous DAC. Slight increase in resolution, especially of sounds on the very high end - cymbal ticks, chimes, plucking noises of a guitar, stuff like that. Not sure it'd be worth the cost of this as a replacement in this rig alone, but I'm very curious to see how it does with the Yulong A18 amp, that it's kinda designed to pair with. I was not 100% happy with the A18 paired with my SuperDAC 2496, so I want to hear if the DA8 fixes those issues. Busy day though, so I'm not gonna get to it until at least tomorrow.
More to come...
And the manufacturer's page:
:text-link:
It's got coax, optical, aes/ebu, and USB inputs. It's capable of decoding DSD, and PCM up to 32bit/384kHz. It uses the ESS Sabre32 DAC chip, which is the same one Oppo uses in the BDP-105 and the HA-1 (their new headphone DAC/amp).
Preliminary opinion, after listening to my demo tracks with DA8 as DAC only (it has a built in amp which you can switch off to improve S/N of the DAC), along with my Woo WA6 and Denon D5000: really nice, a noticeable - albeit not ENORMOUS - step up from my previous DAC. Slight increase in resolution, especially of sounds on the very high end - cymbal ticks, chimes, plucking noises of a guitar, stuff like that. Not sure it'd be worth the cost of this as a replacement in this rig alone, but I'm very curious to see how it does with the Yulong A18 amp, that it's kinda designed to pair with. I was not 100% happy with the A18 paired with my SuperDAC 2496, so I want to hear if the DA8 fixes those issues. Busy day though, so I'm not gonna get to it until at least tomorrow.
More to come...