![]() ![]() Their first product is the winged Pegasus DAC that I am honored to do a world first review.ĭo note that a young team doesn’t mean they don’t have the knowledge or the experience in working and developing such devices as clearly, they do! With more than 20 years of research and development under their belts, they know how to create and design and after closely inspecting their first product, I felt that for myself. Musician-Audio is at its infancy, as the company was formed literally months ago in 2020. Musician-Audio is a very new team that is committed to R2R design by having a lot more freedom in designing their own sound signature without the boundaries put in place by off-the-shelf components. You will need to have some exemplary engineering skills to create and perfect your own R2R ladder network and some good programming skills too, since developing a flawless code inside a FPGA silicon could take years of polish until perfection happens. Generally speaking, designing an R2R ladder network is by orders of magnitude more difficult to make and balance its flaws compared to a D/S design and that will be always reflected in the size, weight and price of those units. Some manufacturers will over-populate that board with hundreds of electrolytic caps (Denafrips), others will put an insane amount of importance to the output stage and power filtering (Audio-GD), others might develop their own resistors and challenge the best ones on the planet (Rockna, MSB Technologies), there are some that are looking much better on the inside than on the outside (Holo Audio), there are some that don’t like new technologies and are living in the past (Mojo-Audio) and there are some that are having a bit of everything and are priced accordingly, Musician-Audio is that kind of brand that I will be writing about today. With R2R, I can see different thinking and feel some powerful design philosophies. When I’m looking at an R2R circuit board, I will start following the signal path and I would always find different ideas and some clever decisions to counterbalance its flaws. Every manufacturer will design its R2R ladder network completely differently as opposed to D/S DACs. I’m always fascinated about them, because when I open their cases, a world of unknown will always appear in front of me. ![]() ![]() ![]() R-2R Resistor ladder DACs (R2R from now on) are such devices. I do slightly get bored because of that and would rather test something more complex, that is more interesting, much harder to understand, develop and tune for long periods of time. They could have the same commercial DAC chips, the same USB boards, clocks, FPGA silicon, capacitors and often times the only difference would be the PCB layout and power filtering. There are a lot of D/S DACs on the market that look almost identical on the inside as often times they carry the same off-the-shelf components. You don’t need to be a famous audio engineer to design a good measuring D/S DAC as every single month a better measuring DAC would come out and outperform the 1-month old champion. Multi-thousand dollars DACs of the past are outperformed nowadays by units that are costing less than $1K. Delta-Sigma pulse modulation DACs (D/S from now on) are approaching its peak right now, challenging the best audio analyzers on the planet and our hearing abilities. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |