We had 6 pairs of experienced ears comparing these two products with objective to determine if Prism Sound Orpheus was capable of knocking Bryston BDA-1 out of one of listeners’ audio chain. Prism needs no introduction, it will suffice to say that Orpheus is packed with features, and quite more expensive that BDA-1, but considering what it does its price tag suddenly does not appear to be high at all. You can find info about Orpheus on the net, as well as one professional reviews where Orpheus and BDA-1 were directly compared and Orpheus was pronounced the winner
http://thedspproject.com/prism-sound-orpheus-review.
The test was quite well executed, volume was properly adjusted and no one knew what DAC was playing at the time, everyone rated specific performance aspect (tonality, dynamics, transparency) for DAC1 and DAC2, not knowing which one was BDA-1 and which one was Orpheus.
The system consisted of PMC IB2S, Bryston 7B SST2, BP26, and a nuber of exceptional digital sources (sound station with Lynx using AES/EBU), number of quality players (Esoteric, etc.).
The difference was quite obvious between the two DACs, and some among us were able to easily recognize BDA-1 character after a few tracks (me being among them), yet some were deceived and convinced that DAC1 was BDA-1 while in fact it was DAC2 despite the fact they were very familiar with BDA-1 (they owned it).
I will get back to the conclusion of our session, preferences were 3 in favor of BDA-1 and 3 in favor of Orpheus.
One of the listeners that preferred Orpheus was the one that was convinced it was BDA-1.
What I heard was the following.
As said, I was able to recognize BDA-1 in a clearly blind test, it was not a mystery till the end for me. And I preferred by a large margin BDA-1.
Main reason being that Orpheus lacked low end fundamentals, what made its presentation tilted towards higher end. In some tracks it was not so obvious, for example voices you are not terribly familiar with sounded quite right on Orpheus, however when known recordings with familiar instruments came up it was clear to me that tonality on Orpheus was not right.
I believe it is this tilt that made others prefer Orpheus, it is an old trick where people are impressed by clarity (which was one of strong impressions expressed by those who preferred Orpheus) which in fact is not the result of better transparency but the described tilt.
And I believe this tilt is the result of less than optimal analog section in Orpheus, this is a trait I have seen many times in digital components that are built with less than optimal op-amps and poorer PSUs.
Next was comparison of two DACs driving amplifiers directly with volume control in digital domain (a very good volume control, no loss of resolution).
The reason for this comparison was a long time ago established observation that transparency and dynamics are increased enormously with pre-amp removed from the chain (it is absolutely an enormous gain in performance). This will of course work only if source is capable of driving amp directly (and very few are) and you have good digital volume control (very few are).
In this test the difference between BDA-1 and Orpheus became clear to everyone and there was no doubt that BDA-1 would not be dethroned in this listener’s audio system.
To get an idea how good it sounds with BDA-1 driving amps consider this, between the setup with pre-amp in the chain and Esoteric playing superb SACD recording, and pre-amp-less chain where BDA-1 drives amps and we play 16/44.1 PCM version of the same recording, the preference was clearly PCM (yes, it is so much better).
