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DENAFRIPS DAC ---- Owner Impressions, Feedback, General Discussion, Questions and more....

Thread for OWNER IMPRESSIONS, FEEDBACK, QUESTIONS, ETC. regarding DENAFRIPS DACs.

DENAFRIPS lists the following R2R DACs:

Ares, Pontus, Venus, and Terminator (in increasing price order).

"DENAFRIPS incorporated in year 2012, focus in developing high end audio equipment at a very affordable price. Throughout the years of intense Research & Development, and continuous improvement of the product lines, DENAFRIPS had finally settled with the current product range equipped with R-2R ladder DAC technology. The reason behind this is the designer strongly believe that R-2R DAC is the best way to reproduce music.

The name, DENAFRIPS, stand for:

D-ynamic
E-xquisite
N-atural
A-ttractive
F-idelity
R-efined
I-ntoxicating
P-ure
S-ophisticated

This mean a lot and it is the house-sound of all DENAFRIPS products." [Copied From Denafrips About Us section]
david_ten

Showing 5 responses by anwar

anwar
119 posts
 
I had the Terminator for about 4 months. As it goes through the break-in process, the sound gets better and better. Beyond 2000 hours of use, it sounds very good, sometimes better than vinyl.

But today I had the biggest ’aha’ moment in my hifi journey. After 3-week wait, I received my Marantz SA-10, a CD/SACD player with USB Audio, USB flash drive, and coax inputs, can be used as DAC even thought it does not have a conventional DAC (all signals upscaled to DSD 4x and sent directly to analog output stage with filters). Wow, out of the box, it terminated my Terminator and vinyl rigs. The SA-10 costs about 1.5x of Terminator, but the sound difference is a lot more than that. Each of them (Terminator and SA-10) costs less than my AR phono stage.

When my SA-10 is fully broken in, I will share my impression.
anwar
119 posts
 
@david_ten   thanks. My system is described here: https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/2598 even though the pictures are outdated. It starts with Torus AVR30 wall mount. Power cables either Furutech or Supra. All IC XLR. 3 x 1.5m Organic Cable plus 2 x DIY DH Labs Silver Sonic BL-1 used between sources to preamp. But for comparison of SA-10 and Terminator, Organic Cable XLR were used. Preamp is semi-DIY fully balanced pure silver passive autoformer using components from John Chapman. The output goes into Bryston 10B-SUB active crossover, then to my amp and JL f113 subs. 2 x DIY XLR interconnect (Swiss-made Audio Consulting 0.5mm pure silver solid core 0.5mm internal dia with cotton sleeving) used from preamp to 10B and 10B to MC452. The internal hook-up wires inside the DIY passive preamp are also Audio Consulting silver wires.
anwar
119 posts
 
Saleh, you should wait a bit longer before Terminator really sounds good, from my own experience around 2000 hours.  Are you only playing ripped CDs?  What about ripped SACD in DSF or songs purchased online in DSD 2x format, does it work through AES?
anwar
119 posts
 
A couple of days is not enough.  After about 2 months, I heard no more improvement.  Please don't remove the AC power but you can put the Terminator on standby.  
anwar
119 posts
 
@smodtactical  if within your budget, why not consider Marantz SA-10 which has built-in, good quality headphone amp? It’s a reference-class CD/SACD player with USB (Type A and B) and SPDIF inputs. You need to read more about SA-10 DAC-less conversion. It’s hard for me to go back to Terminator after listening to SA-10. I still have both.
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