Popular Post Nenon Posted November 23, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted November 23, 2020 On 11/18/2020 at 3:55 PM, DAVE JS2 said: Doing this will void your warranty on the DAVE, goes against the advice of Rob Watts (designer) and Chord, your experience could differ from mine for a host of reasons, and you are of course entirely responsible for any damage you do to your equipment (or anything else) in the process. I also realise it’s not exactly a solution that’s available to all. Notwithstanding all that, I wanted to share this in case it was of interest / use to anyone, as I have found the results to be excellent, and well beyond my expectations. I got what I consider to be a big step change up, not a small evolution. What did I do? Replaced the onboard SMPS within my Chord DAVE using two JS-2s (each factory modded to offer 15V from one output). There’s a link to a full description at the end of this post. The actual conversion was well planned in advance, but was a pretty quick & easy thing to do on the day; I am not the most experienced at this type of thing (its the first time I have ever opened up a bit of HiFi kit), and its entirely reversible if you’re even minimally careful. Why did I do it? I’ve been hearing for myself the extent of the role of the quality of AC and DC power in sound quality, and in the process finding the DAVE to be very sensitive to power noise & RFI. I’d read on another forum a post about having good results from doing the DC conversion. It made a lot of sense to me and felt it was worth a shot. How does the DC-converted DAVE sound? I thought it was already very good, but I’ve noted the following significant qualitative improvements: Performances are more toe-tappingly engaging, completely effortless to listen to, of greater clarity but also with greater smoothness, a very sophisticated sound, the performers and instruments properly feel like they are in the room with me, and I am compelled to listen to my whole library again. I perceive it as a significant step up rather than a small increment. I’m hearing new things in, and new aspects of, every track. I feel it liberates the rest of the DAVE, the SMPS was really holding it back. Its real music. To attempt to use hifi-reviewer vocabulary to describe what aspects of the sound changed: Much faster transients, highly detailed, better bass depth, weight and focus, instrument separation, even wider soundstage. It removes a sheen of harshness, sibilance is gone. All this is in the context of real musical coherence, rather than ‘hifi’. This improvement was independently verified by my good friend and fellow hifi ‘victim’ who came over to help me with the mod, and my eye-rollingly sceptical wife who says the overall effect of the new detail & in-the-room ‘presence’ is “creepy” - which I’ve taken as an endorsement 😉 What were my expectations? Given my experiences with the ferrite cores on the BNCs and AC power cables to the Chord kit (see below), I felt / knew the DAVE was sensitive to electrical noise. So I was hoping for improvements to the classic symptoms of electrical noise e.g. reduced harshness & sibilance. What I wasn’t prepared for was the transient speed, bass depth & control and soundstage / presence improvements; ironically I felt these were already good (they’d been improved a lot by a mains spur & thick direct-wired power leads - again, see below). What’s the rest of the system? To give some context: Speakers and listening position are in equilateral alignment and care has been taken with siting in the room. The room has been acoustically treated (by me not a professional) to give a pretty flat frequency response. [Incidentally; in the past I used DIRAC room correction, and I’ve found doing it ‘au naturelle’ eventually gave much better soundstage / presence.] I use Roon with ethernet data going through a couple of Uptone etherRegens, the second one in the listening room and linked via SFP fiber to a Sonore opticalRendu, a single JS-2 powering both. The Sonore USB out feeds a Chord Blu Mk II for WTA upsampling, the output of which goes via Chord’s dual BNC connection to the DAVE [several ferrite cores were needed here to reduce noise from the FPGA in the Blu Mk II corrupting the analog section of the DAVE - its a known issue, ferrites are Rob Watts recommended work-around]. An Uptone UltraCap 1.2 feeds 5V to the USB ports of both the Blu Mk II (I use a dual headed iFi Gemini cable into the Blu Mk II) and the DAVE [This is because i) their USB interfaces use USB 5V to power an internal USB clock; and ii) I have found by experimenting that sound quality is directly related to the ‘quality’ of power on those USB interfaces - even on the unused USB port on the DAVE]. Balanced output from the DAVE (used in pre-amp mode) goes to a Krell FPB700cx which drives a bi-wired pair of B&W 800 D3s. There is a dedicated 40A mains spur to power the kit in the room, no fuses in the way to the main bits of equipment (there are RCDs and MCB of course). There is a combination of iFi active noise cancellation and ferrite cores on the AC power leads (which I made up myself from 6mm2 cables). [I put the ferrite cores on the DAVE and Blu Mk II power leads because I had some left over left over from the BNC ‘fix’, I got curious and tried it, and harshness / sibilance was improved.] How did I do the conversion? I’ve described it in this linked Google doc (with photos!) to try and keep this post to a vaguely manageable length. Special thanks go to Alex at Uptone for his patience when answering my questions and taking the time from his busy schedule to verify the JS-2s would do what I was asking of them before he allowed me to buy them :) Thanks for reading, hope it was of some interest! I can confirm that replacing the stock SMPS on the DAVE DAC with a good LPS makes a big difference. I have a DAVE DAC running next to my reference DIY DAC. I did not like the DAVE DAC in its stock form. Without going into too much details, it just sounded too digital to me. My goal has always been to make my digital sound as analog as possible. After replacing the stock SMPS on the DAVE and doing some more changes on my server, the DAVE completely transformed from an average DAC to exceptionally good. It's proudly sitting side by side next to my reference DAC and I am starting to appreciate the DAVE more and more as the power supply is burning in. I don't use the Uptone Audio JS-2 LPS on mine, but I will leave it at that, because this is an Uptone sponsored forum. Exocer and NanoSword 2 Industry disclosure: Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Aries Cerat, Audio Mirror, Sean Jacobs https://chicagohifi.com Link to comment
Popular Post Nenon Posted November 23, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted November 23, 2020 2 minutes ago, asdf1000 said: What is your reference DAC ? As I mentioned above it's a DIY DAC. It's something I have been working on for 2+ years. I have spent more on parts than a used DAVE goes for. But the DAVE in its current state is superior in almost everything. My DIY DAC still sounds more analog, it has a tone that I like better, and arguably more air around the instruments. That's most likely because of the excellent quality tube analog section. But it does not have the speed, clarity, dynamics, transparency, transients, and everything else the DAVE does. NanoSword, asdf1000 and austinpop 1 2 Industry disclosure: Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Aries Cerat, Audio Mirror, Sean Jacobs https://chicagohifi.com Link to comment
Popular Post Nenon Posted November 24, 2020 Popular Post Share Posted November 24, 2020 2 hours ago, DAVE JS2 said: Hang on...what about the cruelty of depriving ME of listening to my upgraded DAVE?! It is just one that Chord has bought in (see photo), and I'd imagine @JohnSwenson has more pressing matters to attend to. But I'd be happy to send it if it would be of use to him. I have noticed that the older DAVE DACs use the above off-the-shelf product. The newer manufactured units I have seen, 2020 in particular, had this one - EOS Power LFWLT40-3002. It's a $15 power supply on a $10K+ DAC. No wonder we all like this upgrade :). They can talk as much as they want about voicing, but... 16 hours ago, Nenon said: I did not like the DAVE DAC in its stock form. and... 16 hours ago, Nenon said: After replacing the stock SMPS on the DAVE and doing some more changes on my server, the DAVE completely transformed from an average DAC to exceptionally good. In other words, the voicing around the $15 SMPS was not really something I liked in my system. DAVE JS2 and skatbelt 1 1 Industry disclosure: Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Aries Cerat, Audio Mirror, Sean Jacobs https://chicagohifi.com Link to comment
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