Yes, that’s the beauty of steaming - the old dream of all the worlds music being at ones fingertips is literally true.
I’ve always loved jazz but had a small collection of jazz vinyl and cds.
But now I have hundreds of thousands of jazz albums and I’m finding wonderful bands I’d never heard of every week, new and old, in large part helped by recommendations from people like FR and Seakayaker and Bert Bird and others on the forum…
Darko and now Guttenberg have both done videos on this.
They both chose to review it only with headphones.
They were both very positive about it as an integrated headphone DAC and headphone amp.
But it’s interesting that they both declined to do the more important test of it as a DAC in a speaker based system vs other DACs of that price.
I suppose then they would have had to face the complexities of chosing what to plug it into.
I just saw that Guttenberg released a video on the Bartok. I’ll have to check that out.
But you’re right. Looking around his apartment, I doubt he has any high end stuff to plug the Bartok into. Same with Darko. He only ever shows desktop systems. That’s why they don’t review it with a real system with speakers.
I located a dealer that has the Barok. I’m going to try to get down there in the next few weeks and audition it (without headphones!). Even better would be to take it home for a few days.
Well, IIRC Guttenberg has a turntable based hifi worth something like $40k, I think.
Ditto Darko - he has lots of posh amps passing through his hands all the time.
He has had in the past many various preamps and amps including Pass Labs, Krell and many others.
So I didn’t mean that he would not have a good preamp and or power amp to use with it - I just meant that it might not fit with the amps and speakers SG has.
Also, the reason I mentioned it on this track is that the OP found the DCS Bartok couldn’t keep time, even with £5,500 of external clock strapped to its front and was inoffensive and cultured.
When I bought a dCS Debussy I found it more detailed than my 272, but much less musically coherent and enjoyable, so it went back.
Controversial question: So if the OP’s conclusion was also reflected in the main systems of Darko and/or SG, could it even be possible that they both decided to review it as a headphone amp to avoid having to send it back???
We will never know - but if it’s such a great DAC why aren’t they reviewing it in their top system?
Well I think that’s their basic problem. They have good stuff passing through, but they never have a great complete stable system at any single point in time. As soon as they’re done reviewing something, it has to be sent back. So even if they reviewed a bunch of DACs, they would have been with all different equipment, so there’s no consistent basis to directly compare.
The only real way is to try at home in my opinion. That can be difficult if the dealers are far away or are reluctant to do that. I’m going to try though. That’s too big of an expense to gamble on.
I do not know either Darko or Guttenberg but there is a quite comprehensive review of the dCS Bartok at audiophilestyle dot com slash ca slash reviews slash dcs-bartók-dac-with-headphone-amplifier-review-r849.
Well - that’s very interesting.
That review says:
“The prime target consumer - although by no means the only one - is a high-end headphone enthusiast who consumes digital audio from a variety of local and remote sources.”
So that explains why Darko and Gutters both reviewed it as a headphone amp.
Hi Jim,
It’s possible that the 2 separate dealer demonstrations of the Bartok that I had didn’t do it justice. These were 2 well regarded Naim dealers and they used different Naim amps & speakers: 552/500/Wilson Sasha DAW versus 252/300/Kudos Titan 606. The servers were different too, though both dealers used a Nucleus+ running as Roon Core.
Perhaps there was something about the system set ups that held the Bartok back. If so, it’s a shame because that was the streamer that I actually hoped to end up with before the auditions started. DCS is local to home.
I would be quite happy to hear one again in a different set up in order to hear just how well a Bartok can perform.
First time I heard a DAVE I thought that it was a relentlessly bright, glary, tiring and nasty piece of work. Then look what happened a couple of years later…
The review that Nbpf is referring found that Dcs rossini, without external clock, was clearly more dynamic vs the Bartok. However the Bartok was more dynamic vs chord tt / mscaler.
In what possible way could consideration of a DAC be different according to whether, generically, one uses speakers or headphones? I can understand if there is a consdieration of use with a specific headphone or specific speaker, but not generiacally.
Who knows! I have now checked darko.audio and, to tell the truth, I very much dislike the web page. I could not find any pointer to Gutters and the dCS Bartok.
Well, the dynamics of being an audio kit reviewer are such that it’s virtually impossible to take a completely straighforward approach to reporting what you think of every piece of kit you are asked to review.
Because then you would quickly offend and probably alienate most hifi brands and end up with a very small stable of brands whose kit you tend to love, and which you predictably were very positive about.
That means that conscious or unconscious bias are rife in published audio reviews - whether written or spoken.
There is place for written and spoken reviews.
The benefit of the latter is that often you can tell a huge amount by the intonation and body language of the reviewer in a video.
Especially when they extemporize - as those 2 reviewers do.
Sure, I am perfectly fine with hundreds or thousands of YouTube channels offering reviews of whatever devices as long as I do not have to listen to them!!!
I’ve just re-read your views on the D&D 8C speakers as i couldn’t remember why you didn’t go that route in the end. They’ve intrigued me for quite a while so i’m off to listen to a pair next week, not only to see if it’s worth a home demo but also to understand a bit more about how they ‘could’ integrate into our system in the lounge…