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Fayne
2575
Mar 11, 2018
DAC arrived earlier today, been running it through its paces.
First off, this is *not* an amp of any worth and I don't understand why they label it as one. This is a DAC with a monitor port. It sounds purty and extremely clear via phones, but is worthless at driving planar cans (HE4xx & T50RPmk3). Turned the dial to 0 and my brains didn't attempt to melt, sadly. The monitor out on my Behringer XR18 destroys it, power wise. This was expected, and absolutely not why I ordered it. The single purpose in life for this unit is to provide fully balanced output to the aforementioned XR18 mixer, which will route the audio where it belongs.
The audio coming out of the XLR on this unit is nice and clean with no background noise (that my ears register, or show on VU). I've not tested the RCA (I'm too lazy to move the Dot 1+). The levels are FIXED, which is great for driving high end gear, but will require a preamp if you want volume control.
I've not had a chance to test how well it handles the SPDIF and TOSLINK interfaces, but I'm going to assume they'll work just fine. I will have to route some glastic from one of my workstations and find out.
The only real WTF moment I had with it was not understanding that it defaults to output on RCA, not XLR. Input selection is all done via jog, no menu required. Output selection is done via menu.
Would I suggest one of these at this point? If you need a DAC? For bloody sure. This will happily feed any audio device delicious sound.
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