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Oppo Sonica DAC coming Fall 2016


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Well, actually the Sonica has extruded aluminum top, aluminum front, plastic sides, and steel bottom & back. The wifi and bluetooth antennas are near the plastic side panel.

 

I'm finding the Sonica harsh too. With the Gustard DAC, modifying from generic to Fred ultra-soft recovery bridge rectifier diodes made it a whole lot more musical and listenable. I'm not going to touch my Sonica until I decide to keep it or not. The streaming etc. features over a pure dac like the Gustard X20pro compensate for sonic shortcomings making the decision harder.

 

What the Gustard Pro has that Sonica does not are: 1. Independant low noise voltage regulators for each stereo channel; Sonica shares +/- 12v 3 terminal regulators for both channels; 2. Discrete buffered outputs; 3. 8 paralleled dac channels for each stereo output channel (2x ES9028pro chips)- Sonica splits 8 dac channels (one ES9038pro chip) between L balanced, R balanced, L single-ended, and R single-ended outputs, I guess like they did in the BD-205 - you will probably find that Sonica's balanced outs sound better due to how dac channels were allocated.

 

The ESS reference design for outputs is a balanced design with differential to single-ended outs derived by going through an extra op amp. Oppo instead uses up separate DAC outputs for the single ended RCA outputs.

 

Fixed 3-terminal regulators are easily fixed in the Sonica by replacement with (~$40 ea.) very low noise discrete ones from (ie) Sparkos, but they will still be shared by both channels. The DAC channel allocation might be fixable by Oppo in software by letting a customer choose have balanced OR RCA outputs via menu.

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