R2R Ladder DACs or All in One Streamer Solutions

If you must know one of the no name Chinese was a nude TDA1541 complete made board from ebay for around $100 all it needed is a power supply added, the owner mounted it all on a block of wood!

And look at that, he’s still going and using I think an R2R d/a conversion still, the one AMR also uses in their DP-777 dac the TDA1305 which was originally made by Philips for Discman use!!!! for it’s low power consumption I believe.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/DAC-kit-TDA1305-TDA1315-Multi-input-USB-Optical-Coaxial/322891865956?hash=i...

Cheers George

Actually abraxalito you just jogged the memory, it was a ’raindrop_hui’ one, ok it had very low order filtering and their was a touch of noise on the output the way he liked it, but it punished the the MF A3/24 musically using the same transport.

Cheers George

even cheap no name ones from China Why do people make up stories?

Really, call all you like, do you think Chinese can’t put a dac together, your so wrong buddy. You have your head in the sand. https://ibb.co/BjRSjp5

The PCM1738 is a segmented DAC

Musical Fidelity used the PCM1738 Delta Sigma dac in 2002 in their A3/24 this was the start of the "new wave" because it was way to expensive to produce R2R chips with the multitude of laser trimmed resistors in them like in the TDA1541 and PCM1702 and 04 and more.
We A/B’d the that MF A3/24 which was mine against R2R dacs, even no name ones from China, which used the TDA1541 and PCM1702/4, and on RedBook CD using the same transport, the R2R chip’ed dacs reined supreme.
And today the "Discrete R2R" like my MSB, my friends Total are even better again than those old "chip based" R2R d/a converters.

Cheers George

More bits isn’t always better.

Correct, RedBook, 16/44, 24/96, or DXD, done with R2R Multibit and done right is "Bit Perfect", where DS (Delta Sigma, 1-Bit, Bit-Stream, Single Bit), is just a facsimile. But it does do DSD, but then there a few discrete R2R Multibit dacs out now that can also do DSD now.

To me the best Delta Sigma dac chip I’ve heard doing RedBook, was one that used a Delta Sigma Burr Brown dac chip in a YBA Dac and Shanling CD , but it was a Hybrid, having the first 4 bits as multibit but the rest taken over with Delta Sigma, that was the Burr Brown PCM1794 or 94 or 98?

It seems to me that TI (Texas Instruments/Burr Brown) with their later dacs "are coming about face" to R2R again and doing these 4 bit Hybrids, instead of their full Delta Sigma PCM1738 etc, as to do full R2R (eg PCM1702/1704etc) is going back to very high costs again because of the manufacturing of them eg: laser trimming all those R2R resistors.) Where doing 4 bit is not too expensive but gives increased sound quality.

Cheers George

chorus
I like the R2R ladder sound and want a tube inside for a little balance with the Solid State gear.

If you worried about that, don't get a tube R2R dac or that's what your stuck with.
Get a good solid state R2R dac one that has digital domain volume, just incase you want to use it direct into a power amp down the line.
And if you feel you need a tube somewhere, then just purchase a tube buffer stage separate to go after the R2R dac.

Cheers George