The DCS is double the price of the PSA or Auralic, nice to know 12,000 pounds or dollars sounds better! Enjoy it
I want this is purchase to be very long term; I won’t be able to afford to do this again in two or three or four years time. The NDX has done me good stead for c. 5 years now and I hope I get much longer out of it’s replacement! As such throwing another grand at the issue might be considered, by some(!), as worth doing.
Also the Bartok could possibly replace the CA2 pre-amp; I’ll certainly try this option and see which is better.
Really looking forward to your thoughts and opinions.
The dCS dealer came right back, when I suggested Bartok, with a 100% confirmation! However it IS more money so it might put the purchase back for another month.
btw… a Directstream vs Bartok review…
Surprise!
He knew instantly that it would perfect for your room.
The reviewer, in his own words, was grovelling to the dCS rep at Munich before he got near the product.
He had to love it, he said, because it was dead neutral and musical, and because the silver finish reminded him of his new Porsche Cayenne.
I have a black, red and cobalt all in use in different areas and an Ifi Nano for work. Great little DACs.
this matched my thinking @anon4216120
I am hoping for eight-ten year ROI; you alone can calculate payback period based on your definition of value using DCF, NPV, with upgradeitis factored in
dCS strategy is to extend longevity through free firmware updates, e.g. Rossini 2.0, reasonable to expect this for the Bartok given the FPGA headroom
Ted at PS Audio does this too, of course
Spoken to the dealer and there’s a Bartok going to be winging it’s way to me early next week - hopefully to stay
tbh there are a couple of immediate advantages to sticking with a one box streamer solution (aka the NDX): No expensive AES cable needed - £150 for a starting price - I don’t need to see about an extra shelf for the rack which would have probably been a couple of hundred quid on top, and also one less remote control
Nice one Steve - i’ll be interested in how you get on. The Bartok is a lovely piece of kit. Great headphone amp as well (if you take that option).
Have fun Steve. I’ve not heard the Bartok, but I had an excellent demo of Rossini (with external clock) a few weeks ago. That combo is a lot more money, but the sound was impressively ‘unimpressive’, just very natural and transparent. The guy doing my demonstration reckons Bartok is of the same ilk. If so it could work a treat for you. I listened through both Naim(552/300) and Soulution 525/511 btw.
Hi Steve, if you have bought the Bartok then enjoy! Otherwise, I would absolutely recommend comparing a Bartok with an Ndx2/XPS before making your final decision.
Best regards, BF
Just hit a big (apt word) issue with the Bartok It’s 2 inches too big (deep) for my Quadraspire…
Oh blow… what to do?
Put a large tea tray on the top shelf.
Audition an NDX2 with external power supply and be delighted with the extra music it brings?
Excellent idea, BF.
When I bought a dCS dac it had lots more detail but lost the coherence of the music.
Jim
Hi James… I thought I would chime in with an update on Audioquest Dragonfly Cobalt.
I am using this DAC via the IPad 5th generation using Apple USB Camera Adapter running Apple firmware 1.0.5 driving a pair of Sennheiser HD650s
From new the DAC was quite impressive, but tight and a little uninvolving. Wind forward 8 hours or so driving headphones things are very different.
The DAC develops a wonderful fluid organic feel… Music seems to flow with no hot spots in bass or high hats fizzing or ghastly sibilence… it all seems to hang there. There is a wonderful tight grip that allows you to enjoy the flow. It’s perhaps more Naim PCM1704K style rather than Chord Electronics reconstruction style… you can’t listen into the recording ‘Mandelbrot’ style but you can enjoy the music, and the wonderful clarity and natural sounding timbres. with a feel of space un exaggerated detail… perhaps helped with its advanced USB noise decoupling. The Cobalt uses an ESS ES9038Q2M DAC chip, fed by a Microchip PIC32MX274 USB receiver. I don’t have details about it’s DSP, other than its slow roll off minimum phase filter suggesting extensive internal oversampling, and I suspect, like Naim, IIR filter design… in this case I suspect it would be for low power… but this is speculation on my part.
Now the device seems really efficient, it hardly gets warm at all, and has only a minimum drain on the iPad battery. It ability to drive the 650s is impressive as these are hard high impedance phones to drive. The bass grip and sub bass is impressive… again not exaggerated.
Comparing driving directly or going via my valve headphone amplifier (Little Dot 3)… going direct wins hands down, with more grip and space around the sounds… it just sounds more emotional and enjoyable directly.
So I heartily recommend if one is after a quality low Ultra power portable USB DAC… oh yes works well with Roon and Apple audio replay using a proxy DSP volume in the DAC that just does its stuff automatically.
Only limitation is that it doesn’t go above 96/24 PCM, but it has a full MQA decoder built in so can go apparently to 192/24 MQA but I haven’t tried that.