Link to info/discussion on the original USB DAC:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=44975.0Well, after much waiting, the new version of USB DAC is now finally available. We finally have some cleaner photos now, please check below.
The front:
Back:
Inside view:
Same great attention to detail:
The purpose of the revision (well, we gotta give ourselves a good reason for doing something, don't we?) is to update the styling to on par with DA-131. We can safely say that of the people we asked, more than 70% prefer the newer styling to the older USB DAC.
Styling aside, we feel that it is about time to update some popular "mods" to our new DA-151.
*Independent oscillator, DAC no longer have to generate its own clock, thus reducing the internal noises. If anyone is willing to try, I suspect TentXO would make it sound even better, but I'm not sure if Tent is selling 12MHz XOs.
*Fully isolated oscillator power, preventing noise from being dumped into DAC's power supply. (not possible if you use DAC + crystal to generate its own clock)
*National's new LME49710 OP-Amp (Replacing OPA604AP), a stellar choice for performance. We have not seen anything in the price range, or 10 times the price to perform much better than what this puppy can do, nuff said.
*Some other minor modifications that are helping the DAC to perform better.
And the result we got is fully in line with what we had expected and plus a little more.
*Sound staging and the location of the instruments now sounded much better, bigger sound stage with more precise location of instruments can now be easily heard. (Believe it or not, this is actually the effect of jitter reduction.)
*More transparent, increased detail and clarity, we are not talking about just a little increase, this improves the performance a fair bit. This is partly from the new National OP-Amp and the improved clock.
*Then general feel is that it is now less laid back and even more neutral sounding.
I have not got the time of putting it on eBay yet, but if anyone's interested, the price is now $240 + $45 shipping (The unit is now much heavier, and double boxed packaging also increase the weight quite a bit.). The original USB DAC is still on eBay, but it will be removed in a couple days due to stock being quite low now (4 unit since I last checked).
As I had previously promised that there will be some forum discount, any DA-151/DA-131 ordered in December will now receive a $10 discount on shipping. (per unit, ordering more than one unit's shipping is a bit more complicated, please ask before ordering.)
