Topping D90 great but question future

[Miska]

3 hours ago, OldBigEars said:

I’m not a fan of upsampled music so I play everything at its native value.

 

With these kind of DACs, Hegel included, you have no choice about whether you have upsampling or not. You can only choose if it's the DAC's algorithm or something else.

 

[Miska]

7 hours ago, barrows said:

I use these settings on my ESS 9038 DAC, and indeed you are right, you cannot bypass the DS modulator and DSP with the ESS chip.  Even though there is no DSD direct mode comparable to what is available on the AKM chips, I prefer the 

ESS 9038 with DSD 256 input. 

 

ESS does fairly minimal processing for DSD, that's why it needs only three MCLK cycles per DSD sample. So it is certainly shortest available path through the chip, especially when run without ASRC/DPLL using synchronous clocks.

 

Hopefully they'll add direct mode in some future version, because their conversion stage architecture would fit that perfectly.

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, barrows said:

Yes, there is clearly a sound quality benefit to the lower processing.  And yes, I prefer to run synchronous clocking, where the bit clock and master clock are synchronous.  As I only play DSD 256, I have only a single 45.1584 MHz clock in my DIY DAC, just a single beating heart.  With my isolated/re-clocked USB interface I do have to run the 2x clock rate.

 

Yeah, that is enough for Sabre at DSD256 (4x BCLK since minimum is 3x). And gives lower phase noise and less strange noise floor effects than when running from a 100 MHz clock.

 

[Miska]

The regular modulators like ASDM7 are not bad either...  And not particularly heavy, with -2s filters and regular modulators one can run DSD256 output even from some Intel Atom models.

 

[Miska]

40 minutes ago, OldBigEars said:

That sounds interesting - would be great if someone could translate that into Roon settings

 

It cannot be, HQPlayer has it's own algorithms.