I would love a Naim DAP. Even though it might seem a bit fanciful, certainly at £300, Naim has clearly spent a lot of time, money and research creating the headphone technology built inside the Atom HE. It would be a shame for them to stop there. It’s not as if there isn’t a market for it either at high prices (the top of the range Astell&Kern model sells for over £3000).
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Actually if you were going to have a Naim Dap, presumeably you’d want the same dac chips and architecture, in particular the use of r2r dacs for your flagship over a delta/sigma for your lower models.
In that case the only option would have been (past tense) either the Cowan P1 or M which ran Burr-Brown 1792s - same as the Cdx2 and Dac V1 or the Hifiman R2R2000 which used the Burr-Brown 1704 or 1702. These are the only daps which run the same dac chips as Naim. Both are out of production and to my ears significantly better than the equivalent Fiio models (I do own both the Cowan P1 and the R2R2000)
Better luck next time!
I had a Cowon Plenue P1. It was lovely looking thing. However, while it did trumpet the fact it used a TI (Burr Brown) 1792A DAC chip, that was about the closest it came to being any kind of Naim-like player. Very far removed in sound to what i would expect from Naim, being overly warm, a bit wooly, rather “slow” sounding and ultimately unengaging. I thought it could possibly be broken so tried another, but it was the same. I did like the meters on it though, even if they were always way behind the music…
Yes, it did tend to sound a touch sleepy until you used the dsp. - i found the headphone bbe ones the best for iems. I felt that it still sounded more analogue than its competitors, other than the Pono.
Errr 272 172 ?
iPad mini. Jobs a good un.
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