Congratulations on quickly meeting your goal! It seems like kickstarter has really become something DAC does very well!
Interesting to read that this new DAC will have multiple inputs. I'm curious as to why - in spite of consistently pursuing and promoting the advantages of the shortest signal path possible - integral USB input is (again) excluded, I'm presuming in favor of leaving it outboard using the existing external converter/adapter? Have most audiophiles using external non-volume controlled DACs given up on computer-based front ends with USB output? It seems like the longest segment in the signal path on DAC DAC anymore is a few cm worth of wire with a pair of (relatively) big external connectors that connect the DAC to the USB converter. Wouldn't shrinking that connection down to maybe a cm worth of copper board traces (considering it looks like there's plenty of room on the DAC DAC board to integrate the USB converter) be the biggest bang for the buck in terms of shortening the signal path?
Thanks for your kind words.
Regarding the signal path, the digital domain provides immunity to signal degradation over distance -- considering practical distances within a household. The jitter immunity of the DAC DAC allows worry-free digital signalling for a "lossless digital path", and adding a selector doesn't affect performance. This is one reason we made the volume control digital on the DAC DAC 2 HSV.
This preserves the very sensitive ANALOG signal path.Regarding USB, we have a solution for USB audio sources (Cherry USB), and it's not used as frequently as in the past. We are finding that internet audio streamers (like the Node 2i that we use, or our old Squeezebox Touch) are becoming the most common source of audio data. Least popular these days is a disc (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) transport, which was number one years ago, and that's pretty much the only situation a volume control on the DAC is necessary. Otherwise, the source is a computer or streamer, which very likely includes a volume control. Well, there's the "TV source", which is usually optical, and may or may not require volume control, but this is another outlier.
We also have another solution for the volume control issue when a non-volume controlled data source drives a non-volume controlled DAC DAC -- the STM amplifier with it's
purely analog volume control.
