“Thirty twenty”. A most common utterance when NAD comes up in hifi conversation; it was the integrated that brought audiophillia to thousands upon thousands of households. The NAD 3020 was – and is – a quintessential piece of everyman hi-fi.  I own one.  It’s a tidy benchmark from which to judge other amplifiers that pass through these doors. Heck, its

Remember Resonessence Labs’ INVICTA – their statement DAC and headphone amplifier?  Refresh your memory with Michael Lavorgna’s review at Audiostream and Srajan Ebaen’s coverage over at 6Moons.  You’ll note from the picture below that Mark Mallinson’s team have added DSD support to new and existing INVICTA owners (via a field-flashable firmware upgrade).  DSD, DXD, PCM 352.8kHz and PCM 384kHz playback now runs on

My final thoughts on AURALiC’s Vega have just gone up on 6Moons. Make no mistake - this is one fine-, fine-sounding DAC.  It gives the listener far more aural satisfaction than DACs swimming in the budget end of the market (say, <$1000).  For a similar cash drop, the Metrum Hex is capable of pulling up alongside.  Both DACs have well thought

As an appetizer to this stand off, I suggest you first devour two slices of dedicated Wyred4Sound mINT review commentary from 6Moons (where it summarily dismisses the Bel Canto C5i) and TONEAudio (where TWO writers dig and find gold). Also check out Sam Tellig’s words on the Peachtree Nova125 at Stereophile.  My coverage isn’t a straight up review of Wyred4Sound’s minT.  Instead,

Schiit Audio are making good on their promise of the Bifrost and Gungnir DACs being modular and fully upgradable. First up, the Bifrost gets a new Uber analogue board. This apparently lifts the ‘sonic and measured performance’ of the Bifrost by borrowing the discrete, direct-coupled gain stage from the Gungnir. The Uber board can be ordered with any new Bifrost

The AURALiC Vega (US$3499) is a ‘digital audio processor’ that handles up to 24/192 PCM on AES/EBU, optical and coaxial (x2) inputs. The USB input is super-sized: it deals PCM up to 32/384 as well as DSD64 and DSD128 [via DoP V1.1]. More on this in a moment. I’ve already written about my DSD listening experiences with this DAC (here)

“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.” Those are the words of Bill Hicks – stand-up

After the rather smashing miniature N3 tube amplifier, Hong Kong’s Miniwatt have launched a new product – the Miniwatt N4. It’s a UAC2.0, async 32bit/192Khz all-in-one DAC and headphone amplifier. Note the stitched leather extrusion – a nice way of acknowledging the rough and tumble of portability.  It’s good to have an edge in this increasingly-crowded portable DAC/headphone space; especially

A few years ago now I was shooting the shit with a friend of a friend over a few beers. That day, the jukebox was getting hit hard with Red Hot Chilli Peppers and I went off into a mini, semi-humorous (or so I thought) rant about how they were overrated. Rather than engage in debate/discussion, my drinking buddy simply

My first slice of Emotiva DAC coverage appeared nearly two years ago. In 2011, I found the XDA-1 to be a bit of a bargain – US$399 for a (then) better-than-average sound atop a killer feature set: remote controllable digital pre-amp with balance outputs. Back then, very few DACs in the shallow end of the budget market could compete with

Metrum Acoustic’s flagship Hex DAC’s USB implementation knocked it out of the park – an internally powered M2Tech OEM module. It’s one of the very few DACs that I’ve heard that doesn’t require Concero or Audiophilleo intervention to reach optimal performance – the Hex kept it all in one box. Time now for the junior Octave to see MKII improvements.

Graham Slee has had his USB DAC & headphone amplifier in the oven for a while…and now it’s finally ready to eat. This palm-sized unit was first christened ‘Itsy’ but now it’s called Bitzie. Not much better if you ask me but it’s a minor niggle for what appears to be an impressive feature set. 24bit/192kHz-capable USB input feeds two