First off thank you. Your channel rocks. Your videos are consistently informative, well put together and entertaining. I hope you continue to grow. Now here’s the deal. I’m feeding a WiiM Ultra into an Onkyo which feeds a set of Polk T50’s. I have the Polk surrounds and center channel as well. I use 2.0 90 percent of the time though. Love music. Hearing a song you love on a hi-fi set up done right can change your life. My dad always had a very high end system when I was growing up . I remember his speakers were Vandersteens. And I thought they were the coolest best sounding speakers on the planet. Very good sounding set up. Anyways, Fast forward 30 years and I’m in the middle of building my first “audiophile” system in my own house. So much fun, and expensive! I think my next step though is an external dac. I’ve been looking at this one for a couple weeks. Do you think it would match up well with the WiiM ultra? And do you think having an AV receiver hurts me? Should I have a power amp instead? I treat the WiiM as if it were a preamp. All gold bananas high end hdmis good rca’s etc.
I have Ess and Akm the new crop, I much prefer the Akm for my tastes, the New SMSL D400 pro is a really affordable and great sounding dac full stop . There are differences and like you say it's a very affordable way to try both .
A couple of other things about this dac you didn't mention are the akm output is 1.8 volt and the ess at 2.0 volt, so you get a little more gain out of the ess side. Also, I would argue the coolest thing about this dac is swappable op amps on the out put stage. I had 2 burson v7 vivids laying around and needed something to put them in. I bought this dac as a cheap option for trying not to break the bank. I Havnt listened to this dac with the stock 5532 op amps. I swapped the v7 vidids in right off the bat, and I gotta say... amazing. I own several dacs, and this with the v7 is probably the favorite I own. I have it set with a tube amp for headphones, and the sound is spectacular. Everything in the chain is warm, so I preferred the ess chip as it gave the sound a little more air plus a little higher gain. This really is a cool unit for a cheap price
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First off thank you. Your channel rocks. Your videos are consistently informative, well put together and entertaining. I hope you continue to grow. Now here’s the deal. I’m feeding a WiiM Ultra into an Onkyo which feeds a set of Polk T50’s. I have the Polk surrounds and center channel as well. I use 2.0 90 percent of the time though. Love music. Hearing a song you love on a hi-fi set up done right can change your life. My dad always had a very high end system when I was growing up . I remember his speakers were Vandersteens. And I thought they were the coolest best sounding speakers on the planet. Very good sounding set up. Anyways, Fast forward 30 years and I’m in the middle of building my first “audiophile” system in my own house. So much fun, and expensive! I think my next step though is an external dac. I’ve been looking at this one for a couple weeks. Do you think it would match up well with the WiiM ultra? And do you think having an AV receiver hurts me? Should I have a power amp instead? I treat the WiiM as if it were a preamp. All gold bananas high end hdmis good rca’s etc.
I have Ess and Akm the new crop, I much prefer the Akm for my tastes, the New SMSL D400 pro is a really affordable and great sounding dac full stop .
There are differences and like you say it's a very affordable way to try both .
A couple of other things about this dac you didn't mention are the akm output is 1.8 volt and the ess at 2.0 volt, so you get a little more gain out of the ess side. Also, I would argue the coolest thing about this dac is swappable op amps on the out put stage. I had 2 burson v7 vivids laying around and needed something to put them in. I bought this dac as a cheap option for trying not to break the bank. I Havnt listened to this dac with the stock 5532 op amps. I swapped the v7 vidids in right off the bat, and I gotta say... amazing. I own several dacs, and this with the v7 is probably the favorite I own. I have it set with a tube amp for headphones, and the sound is spectacular. Everything in the chain is warm, so I preferred the ess chip as it gave the sound a little more air plus a little higher gain. This really is a cool unit for a cheap price