sq225917
Exposer of Foo
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M2TECH Young DAC.
Like a few people on the forums I've been following the development on John Westlake's latest range of dac products for quite a while- 3 years in fact since I started following his discussion thread on DIY-Audio.com. Finally it appears that a limited number are making their way into the hands of our foreign cousins who were lucky enough to have importers who could be bothered to cover the air-freight cost rather than stick them on the slow boat that might eventually bring them to the UK.
I couldn't wait any longer to be honest. Yesterdays must have dac item will be unlikely to still be on the top of the pile in 6 months time such is the pace at which refinements are made, enhanced sample rates added and new communication protocols developed . USB was barely a glint in the eye of serious dac designers when I purchased my last dac. It didn't offer 'enhanced anything' over spdif and was the poor relation in terms of sound quality due to designers having to rely on a very limited number of USB receiver chipsets. Not so today, Async USB sits atop the data communication protocol tree, nudged up on the top seat alongside Firewire. Both protocols offer the ability to run asynchronously allowing the dac to control the generation of the time code and also the rate at which the source sends data to fill the buffers for the dac chips themselves; in terms of jitter performance and sound quality the best of these Async interfaces seem to have the old standards beaten.
My own reference for the past three year has been the Cambridge Audio 840c CD player, a 24bit/192khz sample-rate Toslink and electrical spdif input equipped player that uses dual AD1955 dac chips to handle an Asynchronously up-sampled 384khz signal provided by a 32 bit Black fin DSP chip. When this was a new unit there wasn't a cd player under £3000 with the same sample rate capability and input/output flexibility. Never being satisfied with anything I had the unit modded with the addition of a Tentlabs clock and shunt regulated power supply. The dac chips were given a Paul Hynes shunt reg supply and the output stage was heavily modified, being rebuilt with lower noise op-amps, better decoupling caps and then biased into class A. It has been a very good player, having the edge over my vinyl front end for most of the past three years. A recent upgrade to my vinyl set-up and the addition of a Benz LP cartridge has however swung things back in analogues favour- it was time to upgrade the digital front end.
When I purchased the 840c, CD was my digital source, about 8 months into its residence my laptop became my music repository and I connected up by Toslink. Things stayed like this for a long time then about 18 months ago I purchase a Macbook pro, and the optical out on that sounded worse than on my ACER laptop, ITunes didn't beat Foobar for sound quality, even it did beat it by miles for ease of use and reliability. The Mac was here to stay, so I needed to find some way of improving the output from my Mac. I tried a few Optical to spdif convertors, they made things worse, I tried Songbird, the library database was slow, I tried an external 192khz Firewire soundcard, an improvement but too many boxes and too many cables. Then I came across the Hiface from M2Tech, this little device promised to use a USB port to provide up to 24/192, important for me as I have quite a lot of 176.4/192khz classical music on disc. The Hiface did exactly what it said it did, and for £100 it has been a reliable and unobtrusive bargain. Talk of Hiface mods abounded on the internet after a few months; bodgers were offering upgraded power supplies that looked as if they had been designed in the dark by a suicide bomber. People talked about out of spec spdif level that benefitted from attenuation, my Hiface just played on and on.
An improved Hiface unit with multiple input/output options and the ability to be used with a variety of external power supplies was created- dubbed the Hiface Evo this little box of tricks did it all, for almost any interface format other than Firewire. I was tempted but resisted, if the designer has made this surely he is going to stick a dac onto the end of that at some point, right?
And so here we are, with one from the first shipment of the new M2Tech Young dac, a spdif electrical/optical/ AES/ST-optical/Asynchronous USB 2.0, 384khz input capable dac. It comes in an extruded 20cm square 5cm high aluminium case with a cnc'd logo on the top; the front of the unit has two push buttons, on/off on the LHS and on the RHS a button to cycle through all the input options. Plug the supplied 15v wall-wart supply up it's backside and away you go.
I have to admit to liking its looks right from the start, a compact simple, and practical unit appeals to me, that much is no doubt obvious from what I've written so far. If it just sounded as good as my current unit, but looked as it does then I would have purchased it simply on the basis of its appearance, having a Hiface built inside it and its compact size- oh yes, I'm that shallow. Of course, it doesn't sound as good as my old dac. It actually sounds better.
Since adding the Benz LP to my vinyl set-up my deck has been able to leave to my digital front end in the cold, not only did it have the smoother and more realistic treble that has always separated analogue from digital to my ears but it also had considerably greater weight in the bass, more snap and was able to reveal far greater texture to bass guitar, double bass and kick drum. The Young was intended to redress that balance.
Even from first being plugged in it was apparent that the Young was a sound much closer to what I was looking for, it brought the sound of my digital front end towards the limpid clarity, ease of flow and fatigue free resolution that my vinyl rig provides. My 840c was left floundering with hollow bass lacking in texture. The small amount of digital treble sheen that still remained was brought into bright contrast by the precise, articulate treble of the Young that betrayed no trace of its digital origins. After half an hour of playing either I acclimatized fully to the Young or it settled down/warmed up/burnt in, call it what you will, after 30 minutes use the midrange of the Young had opened out even more bringing an added coherence to massed instruments and highlighting the sense of interplay that exists between the lead and other violins on my favourite Mozart Violin concertos, (192khz, naturally). Technically they are broadly similar players, cutting the filter inputs off their dac chips to handle higher sample rates provided by internal DSP processes- the Young uses a Xlinik Spartan DSP chip to perform the pre-dac number crunching. Where the Young steps out is in its USB input ability, offering a 384khz sampling rate 'input' that no other Async dac can yet match.
The Young is certainly a part finished product, there aren't even a full set of Mac OSX drivers available yet, so all my listening has been made via my old Hiface, I haven't had the chance to try its own in built Hiface Evo and 384khz compatible Async USB 2.0 inputs. I can't imagine they'll sound any worse than the Hiface/spdif input I've been using- potentially it could sound a whole lot better.
The Young dac has provided me with the step up I was looking for and has leveled the playing field between my vinyl and digital front ends again, if anything I'm leaning towards the digital as having the edge, certainly with higher sample rate material- it really is that good. I'm looking forward to the OSX drivers arriving and will probably build out a higher quality power supply than the supplied wall wart. If you love what a Hiface has done for you so far then like me I guess you'll be tempted by what the Young has to offer, once you hear it I'm sure you'll be amazed by the value for money it represents. It's a keeper.
Like a few people on the forums I've been following the development on John Westlake's latest range of dac products for quite a while- 3 years in fact since I started following his discussion thread on DIY-Audio.com. Finally it appears that a limited number are making their way into the hands of our foreign cousins who were lucky enough to have importers who could be bothered to cover the air-freight cost rather than stick them on the slow boat that might eventually bring them to the UK.
I couldn't wait any longer to be honest. Yesterdays must have dac item will be unlikely to still be on the top of the pile in 6 months time such is the pace at which refinements are made, enhanced sample rates added and new communication protocols developed . USB was barely a glint in the eye of serious dac designers when I purchased my last dac. It didn't offer 'enhanced anything' over spdif and was the poor relation in terms of sound quality due to designers having to rely on a very limited number of USB receiver chipsets. Not so today, Async USB sits atop the data communication protocol tree, nudged up on the top seat alongside Firewire. Both protocols offer the ability to run asynchronously allowing the dac to control the generation of the time code and also the rate at which the source sends data to fill the buffers for the dac chips themselves; in terms of jitter performance and sound quality the best of these Async interfaces seem to have the old standards beaten.
My own reference for the past three year has been the Cambridge Audio 840c CD player, a 24bit/192khz sample-rate Toslink and electrical spdif input equipped player that uses dual AD1955 dac chips to handle an Asynchronously up-sampled 384khz signal provided by a 32 bit Black fin DSP chip. When this was a new unit there wasn't a cd player under £3000 with the same sample rate capability and input/output flexibility. Never being satisfied with anything I had the unit modded with the addition of a Tentlabs clock and shunt regulated power supply. The dac chips were given a Paul Hynes shunt reg supply and the output stage was heavily modified, being rebuilt with lower noise op-amps, better decoupling caps and then biased into class A. It has been a very good player, having the edge over my vinyl front end for most of the past three years. A recent upgrade to my vinyl set-up and the addition of a Benz LP cartridge has however swung things back in analogues favour- it was time to upgrade the digital front end.
When I purchased the 840c, CD was my digital source, about 8 months into its residence my laptop became my music repository and I connected up by Toslink. Things stayed like this for a long time then about 18 months ago I purchase a Macbook pro, and the optical out on that sounded worse than on my ACER laptop, ITunes didn't beat Foobar for sound quality, even it did beat it by miles for ease of use and reliability. The Mac was here to stay, so I needed to find some way of improving the output from my Mac. I tried a few Optical to spdif convertors, they made things worse, I tried Songbird, the library database was slow, I tried an external 192khz Firewire soundcard, an improvement but too many boxes and too many cables. Then I came across the Hiface from M2Tech, this little device promised to use a USB port to provide up to 24/192, important for me as I have quite a lot of 176.4/192khz classical music on disc. The Hiface did exactly what it said it did, and for £100 it has been a reliable and unobtrusive bargain. Talk of Hiface mods abounded on the internet after a few months; bodgers were offering upgraded power supplies that looked as if they had been designed in the dark by a suicide bomber. People talked about out of spec spdif level that benefitted from attenuation, my Hiface just played on and on.
An improved Hiface unit with multiple input/output options and the ability to be used with a variety of external power supplies was created- dubbed the Hiface Evo this little box of tricks did it all, for almost any interface format other than Firewire. I was tempted but resisted, if the designer has made this surely he is going to stick a dac onto the end of that at some point, right?
And so here we are, with one from the first shipment of the new M2Tech Young dac, a spdif electrical/optical/ AES/ST-optical/Asynchronous USB 2.0, 384khz input capable dac. It comes in an extruded 20cm square 5cm high aluminium case with a cnc'd logo on the top; the front of the unit has two push buttons, on/off on the LHS and on the RHS a button to cycle through all the input options. Plug the supplied 15v wall-wart supply up it's backside and away you go.
I have to admit to liking its looks right from the start, a compact simple, and practical unit appeals to me, that much is no doubt obvious from what I've written so far. If it just sounded as good as my current unit, but looked as it does then I would have purchased it simply on the basis of its appearance, having a Hiface built inside it and its compact size- oh yes, I'm that shallow. Of course, it doesn't sound as good as my old dac. It actually sounds better.
Since adding the Benz LP to my vinyl set-up my deck has been able to leave to my digital front end in the cold, not only did it have the smoother and more realistic treble that has always separated analogue from digital to my ears but it also had considerably greater weight in the bass, more snap and was able to reveal far greater texture to bass guitar, double bass and kick drum. The Young was intended to redress that balance.
Even from first being plugged in it was apparent that the Young was a sound much closer to what I was looking for, it brought the sound of my digital front end towards the limpid clarity, ease of flow and fatigue free resolution that my vinyl rig provides. My 840c was left floundering with hollow bass lacking in texture. The small amount of digital treble sheen that still remained was brought into bright contrast by the precise, articulate treble of the Young that betrayed no trace of its digital origins. After half an hour of playing either I acclimatized fully to the Young or it settled down/warmed up/burnt in, call it what you will, after 30 minutes use the midrange of the Young had opened out even more bringing an added coherence to massed instruments and highlighting the sense of interplay that exists between the lead and other violins on my favourite Mozart Violin concertos, (192khz, naturally). Technically they are broadly similar players, cutting the filter inputs off their dac chips to handle higher sample rates provided by internal DSP processes- the Young uses a Xlinik Spartan DSP chip to perform the pre-dac number crunching. Where the Young steps out is in its USB input ability, offering a 384khz sampling rate 'input' that no other Async dac can yet match.
The Young is certainly a part finished product, there aren't even a full set of Mac OSX drivers available yet, so all my listening has been made via my old Hiface, I haven't had the chance to try its own in built Hiface Evo and 384khz compatible Async USB 2.0 inputs. I can't imagine they'll sound any worse than the Hiface/spdif input I've been using- potentially it could sound a whole lot better.
The Young dac has provided me with the step up I was looking for and has leveled the playing field between my vinyl and digital front ends again, if anything I'm leaning towards the digital as having the edge, certainly with higher sample rate material- it really is that good. I'm looking forward to the OSX drivers arriving and will probably build out a higher quality power supply than the supplied wall wart. If you love what a Hiface has done for you so far then like me I guess you'll be tempted by what the Young has to offer, once you hear it I'm sure you'll be amazed by the value for money it represents. It's a keeper.
