Topic: Inexpensive Chinese-Made DACs

[udovdh]

It was in the Netherlands before 2006! Just the new year and customes took a few days, then 2 missed deliveries and voila.
The mods are the power, clock and opamps, from memory.
I'll open up the box later this weekend to have a quick look.
Cost was $420 including shipping etc. Add some taxes and you have a total of 400 euro's?

[lds490]

It was in the Netherlands before 2006! Just the new year and customes took a few days, then 2 missed deliveries and voila.
The mods are the power, clock and opamps, from memory.
I'll open up the box later this weekend to have a quick look.
Cost was $420 including shipping etc. Add some taxes and you have a total of 400 euro's?

Sounds like a good deal.  Post some pictures if you have a chance.  +T for new Toys!

[udovdh]

It was even just below 400 euro's.
I don't have a camera but photo's can be see in this thread: http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=139545&page=16
And at http://zhaolu.com/products/product7.htm. Use babelfish to translate from simplified chinese.

[udovdh]

Hmmmm!
It appears we can even get a 1 ppm clock upgrade instead of the upgraded 50 ppm clock for the Zhaolu DAC 1.3...

[udovdh]

Also a bigger housing is possible, making room for the headphone amp upgrade if all the other upgrades (power, clock, opamp) are installed.

[ducati]

A friend of mine recently emailed me about the Poth audio-sold LiTe Audio DAC-Ah.  He said it's great sound for the money. It's a good concept--parallel 8 cheap DACs to improve linearity.  I haven't heard it, but at $175 I'm seriously considering it.

Another choice you may want to check into is the Ack dAck.  They come up fairly cheap used, and are pretty good.  I had an Ack! 2.0 for awhile and it was nice and smooth.  Not the "vinyl out of digital" experience, and I preferred my Simaudio Eclipse LE's internal DAC, but it did do some good things.

[udovdh]

I just was wondering why places like the Zhaolu factory etc don't use their DAC chips in mono mode to increase SNR and THD specs by 3dB. Is it hard to implement? Does cost rise too much?
We are currently at the edge of the technically possible w.r.t. DACs so why not do the mono thing?