D1100 DAC now on Mc website

[Randy Myers]

I had read that thread. Yes some useful info, but seems more like each poster trying to impress each other with big technical description without ever really getting to the point. There also appear to be many contradictions.

If I understand most of the thread it would lead me to believe that r2r is older tech and most DACs today use DS... and any DAC that support DSD are DS...

Is this correct? Reading that thread does not really seem to directly answer this basic question. Are ESS chips DS? Do any of the major DAC offerings even use r2r at this point in time... I refer to specific points in that thread were they are talking about r2r chips being manufactured in the 1990's.... basically all of these threads seem to get into technical babble without actually answering the basic question.

[xv21]

Has anyone heard D1100? How D1100 DAC sounds compared to C52 DAC?

[1KW]

I am thinking this may be my replacement for my MCD500 but would like to know if anyone has one yet ?

[substance]

All new burr brown, cirrus logic, wolfson, akm are single bit delta sigma. Ess dacs have a 6 bit r2r ladder for the first 6 bits and a delta sigma so its a 6+1 bit dac chip.

These new chip sets are more of an fpga than standalone dac chips. They all do spdif receiver, upsampling, jitter reduction, digital filtering in the chip before the signal hits the 1 bit dacs. They usually have multiple 1 bit dacs in parallel in one chip as welll( 8 dacs in ess for example). These above I listed were all separate components in the 90s and ealy 00s era. Oems had to carefully select an spdif receiver, digital filter and in most cases implement their own upsampling algorithms then add dac chips. Now one ess or alike chip does it all. All dac chips in the past output the signal as in current source. They had to build an current to voltage conversion circuit after the dac. Ess dacs have a mode you can select whether you want it output current or voltage. So nowadays all these guys really do is analog input selection, power section and analog low filter after the dac (and volume control of course).

You can't really make 1 bit dac any better than other. It all comes down to the builn features and sw processing in the chips. Ess uses the most sophisticated jitter reduction and upsample software. That's why it sounds really good. Also it helps that its first 6 bits are r2r opposed to the rest of the market. On 9038pro, they might have upped the bits to 8 bits and a delta signa perhaps? If not, its a more capable fpga(more memory more cpu power) which can run more sophisticated up sampling algorithms.

R2r vs delta sigma? R2r is too expensive and difficult to manufacture. R stands for resistor. For each bit there is a pair of matching resistors and another resistor bridging to the next pair/bit. You can imagine a lot resistors for a 24 bit dac. These are basically voltage dividers. The key is to have matching resistors( exact to the smallest point) so the voltages are divided exactly in half. It is extremely difficult and almost impossible to have so many mega matching resistors. Also these resistors decay unevenly in time further effecting their opperations. The first the philips tda1541 was a 16 bit dac, later burr brown pcm1702 was a 20bit and pcm1704( 8 of them in mda1000) was a 24 bit dac. These were all r2r and mutibit dacs. To have really high sn ratios these had to be stacked in parallel hence mda1000 had 8 pcm1704s in parallel. Single bit delts sigma dacs existed even before multibit ones. They were just not advanced enough so r2r dacs always performed better. For a single bit delta signa to perform equally good as a 24 bit r2r, the signal must be oversampled high enough. Ess dacs internally oversample to 1.5mhz (192khz times 8 for example)

Once cost and size of an fpga got smaller, these manufacturers started abandoning the very difficult and expensive to manufacture multibit r2r dacs. They addressed the shortcomings of the delta signa dacs in software in fpga and start to match the performance of a good r2r dac for a fraction of a cost. Since there is only 1 bit, they only needed very few matching resistors now.

Now ess and most modern dacs accept dsd native as well(beside spdif) however they must internally convert to pcm in order to run their upsampling and jitter reduction algorithms. So I wouldn't really worry about the native dsd support. Its just marketing. Who cares if its done before the chip or in the chip. Its done anyway, no avoiding it.


Bit numbers thrown at these dacs chips are just marketing. They are al 1 bit dacs with the exception of ess which is 6+1 bit. 32 bit claim is that they can replicate the performance of a true 32bit chip. They can also except signals upto 32bit and 384khz into their fpga for processing but all incoming signal from 16bit 44.1khz to 32 bit 384khz or dsd/dxd is converted to 32bit 1.5mhz then applied jitter reduction and digital filtering. At such high sampling rate jitter is nearly irrelevant anyway. At the very end this signal is converted to a 1 bit signal more like dsd with even much higher sampling rate.(several mhz).

[substance]

Mcintosh claims d1100 is a dual mono design like c1100 which should mean 1 chip per channel as in two ess chips total. But then they say its an 8 dac in differential mode. Each ess dacs have 8 dacs in differential. This means they use only one of these. Its a lot of marketing until someone open one up and post pics.

[leftside]

I currently have an R2R DAC that I really like (in fact it's one of the few DAC's I've heard that competes with my vinyl setup), but I'm going to try and take a listen to the D1100 soon. Also following this thread and trying to find out more info.

[xv21]

McIntosh D1100 review Stereoplay 04/2017 (Germany): http://www.schlegelmilch-highend.de/...tberichte.html. Site contains some other McIntosh product reviews form German magazines.

[1KW]

For those of us who don't speak German, was it a positive review?

[JBT]

I translated the conclusion.



Highly recommended and fantastic
This also means that the new converter technology used here seems suspicious. The D1100 is the sound surprise even with "simple" 16-bit / 44-kHz data, which is probably the best news to the newcomer. This is highly recommended as a pure DAC and as a preamplifier simply fantastic.

[JBT]

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