DAC Choices - $5,000 to $7,000
this is why it is so important to hear stuff for yourself. Although you and a couple of reviewers indicate the Morpheus may have a touch more meat on the bones than the Adagio or Pavane, I have spoken with several others who have indicated they hear very little if any difference between the Morpheus and the Adagio. I have heard from a couple of people, and from Granny's post below, that the Morpheus is thin sounding, and from one industry insider who recommends using a preamp or buffer with either the Morpheus or the two top Metrum DACs. @mitch2 I also own Adagio since 2018 and used to follow your posts. Initially, i also found its sound to be a little dull and thin. Then after a year, I got hold of EAR868 tube amp and now the sound has become more full-bodied and a little more transparent. Maybe you need to consider changing/adding a tube preamp even for a few days to see if there is any change in the sound. I highly doubt if any other DAC can give you better sound in an almost similar price range. |
Adagio/Pavane is a beautiful sounding DAC and it's a keeper for a longer time. I heard Cees is developing a new DAC for about 10K and we also know that his DACs are modular. You must have heard about their plan of upgrading Jade/Onyx to the levels of Adagio/Pavane. So Cees might think of upgrading the current Adagio/Pavane to the next level by changing the module. Wishful thinking but you never know. The addition of Marantz SA10 a few months back made me realize that something is wrong with the USB input of my Adagio. So I bought a used Gustard U12 to use the AES input of Adagio. Results were very surprising honestly. So now I plan to add Denafrips GAIA (or at least Hermes) and install the i2s module in Adagio to use i2s out of GAIA. Earlier I was thinking of buying either of Aurender N10, SOtM trifecta, Lumin U1, or dCS network bridge. So just a trial of U12 has saved me more than $4000. |
Amber seems an obvious choice but I do not want Roon. One of my friends is using modded Amber with great success. I have built a computer audio transport in a Streacom FC10 chassis, powered by HDPlex200 LPS and OS is APL4. I have installed Cantata and use window10 to remotely control my transport. This works very well for me. But the problem is the USB input of Adagio which I want to avoid. U12 is only temporary till better quality GAIA or something similar is added. U16 has good reviews but GAIA has better specs on paper. SOtM is out due to the hassle of multiple boxes and their power supplies. Audio-gd DI-20HE is also out because of its i2s connector being RJ45. |
SOtM boxes are out because I already have many "boxes" from a cassette player, TT to monoblocks. I had to modify my rack a couple of times to accommodate these boxes. Most likely I'll go for GAIA to be future proof and to avoid any modification of my custom made server. GAIA has many input/output connectors and even both i2s types. My friend has done modifications to both hardware and software of Ambre. He used sd card to flash Ambre. |
