Article: Review | DenaFrips Pontus DAC

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4 hours ago, LarryMagoo said:

George,

 

Like everyone here states, thanks for a detailed review.  I really enjoyed reading it since you wetted our whistle about it in your Yggy review.  I own a freshly modified Yggy to the B spec and am really happy with it's performance using the AES input!

 

Are you saying here that the Pontus gives the other more expensive DenaFrips DAC's a run for their money???

 

Thanks again!

Can’t say, not having yet heard any of the more expensive DenaFrips DACs. I’m hoping to get a Terminator Plus and the Gaia scaler next from Alvin Chee. What I definitely AM saying is that the Pontus buries all of the “near”(cost-wise) competition soundly. Detail, lack of coloration, soundstage are all head and shoulders above those DACs that I directly A-B’d it against, and certainly it astounds me vis-a-vis my memories of what the dCS Vivaldi and MSB Diamond IV could do playing the same material (For whatever that’s worth - unfortunately, probably not all that much as the systems were strange to me, and human audio memory is not all that great. We mostly remember overall impressions of a sound presentation, rather than specifics.)

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8 hours ago, davide256 said:

PS.  HDMI 2 channel sound out from a blue ray/SACD player looks like it's hit or miss with i2s DAC's at present. Hope you find it works with Pontus

 

https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/converting-a-blu-ray-sacd-player-into-a-digital-dsd-transport.14625/page-2

 

 

 ME too!

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2 hours ago, JoeWhip said:

We all hear differently. I have not heard this DAC but have heard the Terminator against an Yggy 2 in the same system and with PCM only obviously.  The Yggy sounded better. Of course, YMMV.

I’ll rake your word for it that you find the Yiggy better. To me, the Yiggy is lacking in detail, has muddy low frequencies, strident in the highs, and have a rough, somewhat foggy sounding midrange (by comparison, of course). Maybe that kind of presentation is what constitutes real music to you. If so, more power to you!

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2 hours ago, PeterG said:

Thanks for the great review.  I bought my now upgraded Yggy soon after Chris's rave 5(?) years ago.  Maybe it's time for an upgrade?

 

One dilemma as I visit the website--there are no US dealers, and there are no returns allowed on direct purchases.  Is that correct?  Hard to imagine others dropping even larger dollars on Denafrips under those conditions.  Please advise

That’s a Q for Alvin Chee. I’m not qualified to address that subject.

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7 hours ago, Danny Kaey said:

Great write-up! Curious, I had this DAC a couple years ago for sampling... did they ever fix the Denafrips lettering on the front panel? Someone was dyslexic on the first run... LOL 

 

My only concern with these ladder DACs are the countless resistors that will need to be replaced and kept to tight electrical tolerances over the life cycle... not sure how thermal performance etc. will affect any of this nor if - don't take it the wrong way - Denafrips will be around in 10 years time... otherwise, a fine DAC, though they need to work with Roon to get it certified as a Roon endpoint.

As you can see from the front panel picture in the review above, there are no typographical errors in the front panel silk screening now. Of course, it’s a moot point because one can’t read the writing from more than a couple of inches away, at any rate!

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8 hours ago, JoeWhip said:

Sorry my friend, I don’t hear that at all. No need to be condescending.

I’m not being condescending at all. If I come across that way, above, I sincerely apologize. That was not my intent. I’m just acknowledging that different people look for different things in their music presentation. Honestly, I’m glad you found the sound that suits you!
Also, What I described is what *I * hear when listening to the latest Yiggy when compared to the Pontus.

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18 hours ago, JHG said:

Nice review George!  Would you tell us what input on the Pontus you were using as well as the source?

Thanks,

Jim

I have a number of digital sources, so it would be easier for me to tell you the sources that I don’t use (i2S)!

My Mac Pro running Audirvana uses USB (AudioQuest Diamond for those interested in that sort of thing), my Oppo 205 is connected via coax SPDIF, my Logitech Squeezebox Touch (used only for Internet radio) is connected via Toslink, and my Otari studio DAT recorder/player via AES balanced XLR.

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4 hours ago, skatbelt said:

 

While I more or less agree with the content, it is indeed a condescending response.

 

The bold 'from memory' statement about a comparison with the Vivaldi and MSB DAC also makes that I cannot take this review and it's conclusions very serious. Too bad and not at all necessary to convey enthusiasm.

 

I merely referenced my memory of the Vivaldi and the MSB. I also stated that one should take that memory with a grain of salt. I did not use either in the review proper. I used recordings with which I am intimately familiar and compared DACs to which I had immediate access. I don’t see how the mere mention of impressions of two DACs that I have heard in the past (along with a clearly stated caveat) invalidates a review where conclusions were reached using other DACs to which I was making direct comparisons!
 

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4 hours ago, bbosler said:

 

 

 

It would be very useful if you could share these recordings or let us know how to obtain them. This specific example is something we could listen for with our equipment and have something to compare your experiences too. Without the recording it is much less useful.

 

that said, I appreciate your passion and your willingness to hang it all out there , 

I would be happy to do that, but those recordings, though made by me, don’t belong to me. I can play them for my own edification, but they belong to the person or persons for which the recordings were made. It would be a copyright infringement to release them to others. Granted, these recordings were mostly made for use by the musicians themselves, and were never meant for release, but still, that fact does not give me the right to distribute any of them and I won’t violate that trust. Hope you understand.

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On 12/10/2020 at 9:17 PM, matthias said:

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Please, can you disclose if you listened to the Pontus in Oversampling or Non-Oversampling mode.

 

In the case you listened in OS mode which filter did you use?

 

Thank you

 

Matt

I listened to both OS and NOS. The two modes sound different, and I prefer the OS mode.
The Pontus has no control (that I know of and the manual certainly doesn’t mention it) allowing the listener to change the filters. Perhaps this is a feature of higher-priced DACs such as the Venus or the Terminator/Terminator Plus. Never having used any of these, I wouldn’t know.

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5 hours ago, davide256 said:

@gmgraves Can you confirm that your Pontus has the STM32F446 MCU USB interface for review completeness?

Yes.

 

On 12/10/2020 at 3:01 PM, bbosler said:

 

 

 

It would be very useful if you could share these recordings or let us know how to obtain them. This specific example is something we could listen for with our equipment and have something to compare your experiences too. Without the recording it is much less useful.

 

that said, I appreciate your passion and your willingness to hang it all out there , 

 

1 hour ago, Boleary3 said:

Pontus price is now $2,300. Guess this review caused a $700 price increase......

Yes it is $2300 in SINGAPORE dollars. Scroll further down the page and you’ll see that it’s $1670 U.S. dollars.

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7 minutes ago, Rexp said:

So you didn't want to tell the truth - noted. 

Don’t you think that this comment is a bit unfair? There are realities to the business of equipment journalism that have nothing to do with the performance of the equipment! I suspect that the decision to publish his Pontus review at the expense of other (lesser) contenders probably has more to do with editorial space than it has to do with any cynical dishonesty.

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3 hours ago, Rexp said:

No, honesty is always the best policy. 

How is not publishing reviews of other equipment than the equipment of primary interest, in any way dishonest? By your reckoning, every time a reviewer posts a review, if he doesn’t also review all of that piece’s competition in the same issue, he’s being dishonest. At the very least, that attitude is impractical. If one wants to know how the competition stacks up, then one should go seek out reviews of that competition. Placing all the responsibility on one reviewer is unfair and ultimately unproductive (IMHO, of course).

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13 hours ago, Steve_Burl said:

George can you comment on the Pontus vs.Bryston 3.14 vs. Lumin X1?

 

Thanks, and great review. I wonder how much better the higher end Denafrips units are?

I wonder the same thing. As to your Q, no I have not heard either the Bryston or the Lumin DAC. I have reviewed one of the Lumin music streamers, but not their DACs.

 

rant/ Frankly (at the risk of rendering an unsolicited opinion), I don’t see the point of a hardware music streamer. They are mostly very expensive, and an older computer running Roon or Audirvana et al, does just as well, to serve-up your streaming services such as Tidal, Quobuz, and Amazon Music, and is, in fact, far more capable. Here’s an example. A couple of summers ago, the BBC decided to stream the annual Proms concerts in FLAC in addition to the normal MP3 compression format. You needed to be able to run a certain release of Firefox web browser on a different BBC feed to be able to parse the FLAC. If you could do that, you had access to live, full bandwidth performances of world-class conductors leading the great BBC Symphony Orchestra, every day, in almost 2 months worth of nightly performances, in real time, from the world-famous Royal Albert Hall in London! No hardware streamer could have done that, regardless of cost. But any laptop, running Windows 7/10, Mac, or Linux could do both easily. I even had an application running simultaneously with the correct version of Firefox, which allowed me to capture to a SSD, every performance. It just seems to me that a computer does the streaming of ripped or subscribed-to music over the Internet just as well as any dedicated hardware box, and does other related tasks (such as capturing a stream to HDD) as well, and can do so for a tiny fraction of the cost of an expensive streamer. And even were the price the same, there’s no way that a streamer could be as versatile or as adaptable to changing situations (such as the aforementioned BBC Proms FLAC streaming events). Of course, as always, YMMV. /rant😉