For fun, I thought I'd run an old NOS DAC I had lying around to see how it measures...
This is the ancient Philips TDA1543 DAC, 4 chips in parallel. This particular model is the MUSE audio one you can find on eBay for about $60 with case, wallwart... The DIR9001 digital receiver in this unit allows up to 24/96 but the TDA1543's are 16-bit chips which will truncate the 24-bit data. Behold... Stair-stepped NOS output (this is a 16/44 1kHz sine wave recorded at 24/192): 14452 Summary RightMark results: 14453 14455 Frequency response drops off at the upper end on NOS DAC's and you can see that quite clearly above. Looks like the performance improves with 96kHz sample rate. Many folks who use NOS will upsample the data before feeding into the DAC to take advantage of this fact. THD graph (a bit nasty): 14454 Jitter (16/44 Dunn J-Test): 14456 Well what can one say about NOS DAC's that hasn't been said... They tend to measure poorly. Yet, many swear by them. Sure, this is an inexpensive NOS and there are much more expensive ones out there like the AudioNote products (the AudioNote DAC 0.1x looks like it only has a single 1543 and upper models all seem to use the AD1865 - don't you love their term "1x oversampling"!). Personally, I don't really mind the sound. It does have the high frequency roll-off which works OK for fatiguing music but that also takes away some of the "sparkle" in studio productions. +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: Jitter_16-44.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=14456| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimago's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2207 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97950 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
