AUDIO NOTE DAC 1 TO 5 

Product Code: AUDIONOTE_EX Price: Check Latest The state of digital today is incredibly diverse providing a wide range of choices for the high end consumer. We have the high resolution formats, upsampling, oversampling, tube and solid state , players, dacs, transports, multiple dac chips, jitter reduction, (now) modified players, hybrids, etc, etc, etc... So many choices that it now has become a difficult process when making a decision on what to buy. Well, for the purist we believe the best solution thus far is the nonoversampling topology. After doing much evaluation it was clear to us that oversampling does a great deal of harm to the music. We clearly hear a blurring or ringing effect and a lack of focus with every digital filter we have come across. The emotional content seems to be very much lost as well as the fluidness and pace of what live music does to us. When I hear a piano or keyboard in a live performance the notes sound quite precise and clear however very blurred with the standard oversampled redbook topologies. We believe the ill effects of overshoot and ringing caused by the digital filter is largely responsible for the bad sound we hear from our CD's today. With this in mind we decided to create a reference level upgrade kit which may be applied to the entire range of Audionote 1X oversampling dacs. Audionote is really one of the pioneers of nonoversampling with a great following for those who truly love music. Reference Audio Mods has developed the mod that will offer the Audionote devotees even more music, naturalness, and realism. From the beginning, only very high quality components were used for the very fact that Audionote already uses some very good parts such as Blackgates, silver transformers, tube rectification, paper/oil caps, etc…OK, now let's take a quick look at what the Audionote dacs consists of. All there 1X oversampling dacs ( from the dac 1 to dac 5) use the CS8414 input receiver feeding some simple glue logic chips and then feeding the AD1865 18 dac bit chip…of course without a digital filter. A very simple yet effective topology that is, again, the basis of all there dacs. Now what differs between each level is the implementation of the output stage and this is where the mod begins. Essentially, the mod looks squarely at developing an output stage that may be applied to any level Audionote dac while giving reference quality sound. We hear you…not such an easy task… but we believe we have come to a superior solution. The mod begins by paralleling the very good sounding AD1865 dac to lower the output impedance and increase the current output. We listened quite intensely to both single and parallel chips and became convinced it was the way to go. Another reason was for the fact that I/V conversion were still being executed passively and I always sensed a lack of dynamics with just a single dac chip. The signal is then buffered and sent to the pair of 5687 tubes. The tubes have been given a new power supply which consists of an Audio Consulting M6X power transformer that is specifically designed for this tube. Rectification is now executed with surface mount schottky diodes which seemed to give substantially more pace and rhythm then the tube rectifier as well as greater resolution. For filtering, we chose to use a very high quality Audio Consulting choke, Jensen 4-pole capacitors, Audio Consulting NOS paper in oil, and some ultra low impedance caps. The same was applied to the filament supplies and of course there is no regulation used here thus no feedback in both the power supply and signal path. Finally, the signal is sent from the tube to the highest quality Silver Rock SE OPT in a 1:.5 ratio thus lowering impedance by a factor of 4 or about, 200 ohms. The signal is then buffered again with a final output impedance of ~ 1 ohm!!! So we end up with a dac that has no feedback in the signal or power supply (except for the digital chips) using only the finest quality components. Question…how does it sound??? We were simply blown away!! The improvement over the base unit (Audionote Dac 4 signature) was absolutely huge. Now there is much greater resolution, dynamics and presence. The music had a much greater sense of freedom and flow but at the same time maintaining all the delicacy of beautiful music. Also, one caveat we had with the base unit was a level of opacity that seemed to somehow put a slight veil over the speakers…this has vanished as now our room is immersed in music. Conclusion. We absolutely encourage any Audionote dac owners to strongly consider this modification if you want to take your music and minds to new places. Enjoy. Pricing Price includes parts and installation. Price does not include the unit which is supplied by the customer or any shipping cost that may apply. Please contact us for any questions concerning this modification. Customer Reviews Send us a review and share your thoughts with other customers