Opinions on PS Audio Direct Stream DAC (Mk 1)

Yes it's from the Music Room, although they said something about factory refurbished or authorized, forget which.

Anyway, I offered 1600 and they accepted...  Yes, returns allowed for small restocking fee!

Got the PS Audio DS DAC from Fedex today. I don't know if it needs burn-in. It's "refurbished" so perhaps the innards already have a lot of play time. 

Well in any case I gave it an hour of warmup and started listening. The rest of my system is as follows

Aurender N100 -> USB -> PS Audio DAC -> custom 12AU7/FET headphone amp -> LCD-2 headphone

All cabling including power cables are custom by Igor Kuznetsoff, of the N.J. Audio Society, and the headphone amp was designed by him. I don't have any other expensive cables to compare his to, but the other people in the NJAS tell me that his cabling would cost thousands per cable to duplicate in off the shelf items.

Previously I was using a Gustard x20pro DAC custom modified by Igor. So some of my impressions will be related to differences between that and the PS Audio.

I started with Mahler's 5th symphony, Bernstein conducting. The sound was gorgeous and had great dynamic resolution. At first I thought it was a little sleepy compared to the Gustard, but then I realized that wasn't the right description -- it had emotion, specifically an emotion of sadness. The first movement of the Mahler is a funeral march, so that seems appropriate. I hadn't really noticed the sadness with the Gustard, which made it seem more dramatic and exciting by comparison.

Then I listed to the Police, Syncronicity, the 24/96 remaster. Something odd... the transients had a delicate feel to them and a great deal of music expression, but of a gentle sort. It felt similar in some ways to the Mahler. I started to wonder if the PS Audio, as musical and gorgeous as it was, was imposing a musical character on the music. 

I listened to a lot of other music and kept coming up with the feeling it was imposing a musical character... very gorgeous and expressive, but quickly becoming monotonous and feeling like it didn't match what I expected of the music. I imagine a violin player on stage, full of emotion and playing every nuance with expression, but a bit too caught up in the emotion and overdoing the nuance.

I listened to Elliott Carter's Symphony of Three Orchestras conducted by Boulez. Carter and Boulez are both staunch representatives of the Avant Garde that dominated the 60's and 70's, and Carter's composition was dissonant and hyper complex. Yet it had the same gorgeous, emotive character.

Okay if it can make Carter sound "gorgeous," something is wrong.

The Gustard with Igor's mods is very dynamic, micro and macro, very high resolution, and very extended. I ended up with a new appreciation of its neutral character. 

Well, I'm going to give the PS Audio some more time.

Well, I'm liking it a little better. It doesn't just do gentle transients - it can slam pretty hard on drums etc. It's shocking how much musical expression it's finding in my old 16/44.1 recordings, often poorly made compared to the DSD files audiophiles prefer now. (My favorite conductors, orchestras, performers etc. are mostly found on old CDs I purchase used from EBay or Amazon.) It hasn't proven itself to me yet -- that is, I'm not convinced the music expression is accurate to the original performance - but I'm definitely sitting up in interest.

Further update... I'm loving my DirectStream DAC at this point. 

I mainly listen to classical, so there is emphasis on beauty of timbre as well as musical expression through macro- and micro-dynamics. The DSDAC renders the subtle phrase dynamics beautifully. 

I listened to a Beethoven piano sonata performed by Barenboim, who is a monster player, and it was thrilling. Barenboim's interpretative choices worked especially well compared to other DACs... and his highly dynamic playing was evident. He was committing violence on the piano and the DSDAC revealed it all.

The resolution is stunning. Hall ambience decay times, following the cutoff of the last note, are very extended.

Only problem: the softer bass instruments can get covered up by the midrange and lose their pitch. If a bass instrument has a lot of harmonics, sure you can hear it clearly, but if it's a bass guitar (without distortion) or double bass and it's not playing forte it just gets lost under the midrange and the pitch disappears. This is a pretty significant problem as a lot of classical music recordings are unnaturally light in the bass (apparently those recording engineers aren't bass heads). I'm hoping the bass will improve with burn-in.

Regarding cabling, power, etc.

- I use parallel capacitance for power conditioning, using boxes that plug into the wall. They have 10 uF capacitors, chosen for best sound by Igor, between hot and neutral, hot and ground, and neutral and group, so 30 uF each. I have about 12 of these boxes around my apartment, giving 360 uF of parallel capacitance, but that doesn't count the system circuit, which has another 100 uF between neutral and hot, and hot and ground (the system circuit skips the neutral-to-ground caps to avoid hum). I use power cords by Igor, which he sells for $850, and the other members of the NJAS say it would take $3000-5000 to duplicate their performance in stock items. I use interconnects without a traditional shield, but instead use ERS fabric to absorb RFI. They are low capacitance given that they don't have a shield. 

I also have the DSDAC as well as my Aurender N100 sitting on a vibration damping solution created by Igor... squash balls sitting in little cups filled with damping material. His experiments showed him that pneumatic support sounds best, and squash balls work perfectly as long as you sit them in a little dollup of damping material to inhibit resonance modes within the rubber walls of the ball. The DS DAC and the Aurender are each sitting on six squash balls. 

@jmeyers When I was in college, I took a course in audio engineering from James Boyk, a pianist/recording engineer. He used to say that no measurement has ever been found that correlates with sound quality. He typically judged tubes and analog as performing better than solid state and digital, and when he said the sound quality was "good", he meant it faithfully reproduced the live sound. He had a lot of experience in recording sessions hearing both the live sound, and then hearing the reproduced sound in the control room, back-to-back. He did consulting for Sheffield Lab, and if you are familiar with their recordings, you will know they are very high resolution, very dynamic (micro- and macro-). 

Specifically about the PS Audio, the fact the it has an output transformer might be related to the measured harmonic distortion. It doesn't prevent the PS Audio from having high resolution, but I don't have a more technical explanation than that.

I'm the OP. I've listened for a while and given it a few hundred hours of burn-in just in case that was needed. I'm giving up on it for two reasons: too bright, and weak bass (poor pitch definition). I'm using it with a headphone system, mostly: a classic LCD-2 and an LCD-X, together with a custom 12AU7/FET headphone amplifier that is very extended and powerful. 

I sensed it as too bright. For instance, in chamber music, the instruments in the upper registers tended to stand out much more than the lower instruments. Or in a piece by Chopin, the pianist's right hand dominated the texture far too much. 

The bass had poor pitch definition. First, the midbass was recessed. I could barely hear some midbass notes in classical pieces. Easier in rock, but didn't really provide a firm foundation. The deep bass sounded like an unpitched thump (poor pitch definition).

The brightness is not really a "bad" thing--maybe it's a good system match for darker speakers. I don't know how to explain the bass problems.

The Music Room says they will accept returns with a smallish restocking fee, but I'm not sure what the time limit is. I'm at 29 days since ordering it.

@shooter41 Do you have aftermarket cables on your Hifiman or Focals? I have a very good cable by Igor Kuznetsoff of the NJ Audiophile Society on my Audeze phones. I tried the Focal Clear OG recently but had only the stock cable, and it wasn't anywhere close to the Audeze LCD-X with Igor's cable in resolution and microdynamics. But I suspect it's not a fair comparison until I get an equally good cable.