Another excellent product. Smooth, uncolored, nothing stands out.. You can hear a difference between the two DAC chips. I usually go towards the ESS chips because of their more energetic, livelier sound, but I'm quite impressed with the AKM chip implementation. It is a bit smoother than the ESS and actually has good treble extension. It doesn't sound slightly muted in the treble region unlike most AKM chips.. At least to my ears. With my setup, I haven't reverted back to the ESS chip. But, I will eventually just to change things up. The only nit-picky thing I can think of about this DAC is when you display the VU meters, they seem to peg out and stay that way for a few seconds, every now and then before dropping back to normal and dancing like they should be.. Maybe a firmware upgrade can fix that?? Other than that, it's an outstanding DAC.
FINALLY, the D20 DAC to complete the 10th anniversary set of components. I am very impressed with this DAC as also the A20 amp and T20 preamp, these components are truly great performers for there price and this is coming from a person that has over $40,000.00 invested in there main rig. I have inserted each component individually into my main system and though they were outdone I never felt the rush to take them out.The DAC is a great offering and a stellar performer offering your choice of DAC chips to adjust to your musical preference. As a matter of fact I recently sold my main DAC in order to fund my next purchase and in the interem I am using the D20 DAC, so far it has provided me with quite a few late nights of enjoyable listening while I should have been sleeping. The whole stackk is great for a desktop setup and a great way for those looking to dip there feet into the hobby.
Very good quality
I like it a lot, but I would say that if you guys could figure out how to keep it from hesitating every time that I play something after not playing anything for about 10 seconds when on USB 2.0. That would make it great. (Also, windows will only acknowledge it up to 384/32, 768/32 is nowhere to be found even after making sure the driver installed correctly).
