Hi Hugh and All
This is an outgrowth of the thread I started about Foxtel. In it Hugh mentioned about the new Touch which sparked me to do a bit of investigation. I was initially going to add it to the end of the thread but thought others may be interested on what I gleaned. Now it is released there is actually a fair bit of info appearing about it especially from the beta testers who obviously had it a bit longer. The following is typical:
'I'm one of the beta testers and have done extensive listening to the Touch and tried it up against several external DACs, but I don't have a DacMagic so I can't give you the exact desired comparison. I HAVE done a comparison with a PeachTree Nova which has a very good sounding Sabre DAC. As comparison the sound from the Nova DAC when connected to a SB3 is way better than the analog outs of the SB3, when I hook the Nova up to the Touch the sound of the Touch's analog outs are very close to that of the Nova DAC. The Nova is slightly better but not by much. One interesting aspect of this is that the Touch has a much better digital out than the SB3, and even with the Sabre DAC I can hear a difference, the out of the Nova when connected to the Touch is better than when it is connected to the SB3. The upshot is that the output from the Touch analog outs is actually better than the output from the Nova when connected to the SB3! The analog outs of the Touch are that good. My guess here is that the DacMagic driven from the Touch is probably going to be pretty similar to the Touch's analog outs, it may be a little better and it may not. You are probably going to find that external things such as the cable used, length, AC mains condition etc are going to have an impact on which sounds better. I will expect that in some people's systems the external DAC sounds slightly better and in some it does not.So I think you are going to have to listen for yourself and make your own decision. Note that I actually prefer the sound of the Touch to the Transporter, the Touch has no active circuitry after the DAC chip at all, the Transporter uses fairly standard OP-AMP circuitry, which might be why I prefer the Touch.'
This is fairly typical across the board. The highlights are:
The digital out is very very good - could be as good as just about anything available.
The analogue output, while still able to be beaten by an external dac, is very close to DAC's like the Lavry and Benchmark. Indeed a guy who had a Lavry did some blind testing (guys who know me know the very high value I place on that) and could pick the difference but it was very difficult - you had to strain really really hard - it was that close - and he knew the Lavry really well. I suspect only quite expensive dacs like Steve Nugents overdrive would make an appreciable difference and even then it almost certainly wont be chalk and cheese.
Interestingly the port can actually be used to connect a USB DAC and have that DAC run asynchronously to virtually eliminate jitter. People that have done it report there may be an ever so slight improvement over using the digital out, but the new digital out is so good again there aren't much in it. They have gone to great pains to reduce jitter a lot and got rid of design flaws with the SB3 digital out that evidently caused reflections and other stuff.
The decoupling capacitor on the audio out has evidently disappeared - upgrades to sonicaps etc are likely not of any value. No op-amp either mucking up the output - it is driven directly from the dac.
The audio output is actually better than a transporter which is a lot more expensive. And transporters have been compared to some quite expensive DAC's.
Bottom line here is I am not so sure at a realistic price you can improve too much on this beast. Maybe Hugh's nifty supply could make a difference (I suspect it could) but apart from that I think you really can't go past this. Very impressed I must say. It will be very interesting what Wayne over at Boulder makes of it when he get one to mod. Evidently he will be doing that in the next few days.
Thanks
Bill
