Musetec (LKS) MH-DA005 DAC

@charles1dad

It’s just the three set of jumpers from board to board that are wired with short discrete silver wires. This is in place of the standard thin gauge ganged copper jumper connections. The O-Ring transformer powering the analog board is wound with silver plated OCC wire. I’d guess you’d call that attention to detail.

@melm

 I’d guess you’d call that attention to detail.

Yes, and in my experience it is this  type of attention that makes a difference for the better sonically. Those seemingly small details matter.

Charles

I imagine if the 005 came with both silver and copper jumpers, the users could fine tune the overall sound of their system. 🎶 Excellent thread.

Wig

I do like combo of silver and copper throughout system, about 50/50 at present. As system has progressed over the years increasing amount of  silver added. My 300B monoblocks use vast majority silver wire, including output transformers. I've found silver has both greater refinement and extension on top, copper added for fuller mids and bass, silver also helps with articulation in bass.  Silver plated copper also very nice in certain places.

I recall a time when I couldn't stand virtually any silver in previous systems, always added unwanted brightness in highs, thin mids and bass. How times change!

I’ve been doing some reading about the Musetec 005 and I am getting a very strong suspicion that the designer/builder may have actually listened to each part during the selection/rejection decision making stage.
1 Audionote Kaisei capacitors along with the Mundorf in the power supply.

2 Silicon carbide Schottky diodes.

3 Gold and silver foil capacitors in a discrete (No Op-amps) analog output stage.

4 As mentioned earlier, solid silver wire rather than cheaper thin copper traces to connect various boards.

5 Particular attention paid to clock implementation.

6 What seems to be an overbuilt power supply.

In my opinion these are not casual choices. Someone had to at some point do some comparative listening testing to choose these types of parts. This tells me that whom ever did the actual decision making seem to rely on listening to parts rather than solely a reliance on how they measured.

Perhaps  it is just me, but I find this very impressive. Who ever it is that did final part selection chose some really good quality pieces. It’s easier now for me to understand how this DAC fared so well up against the Bricasti M1 SE. Someone was serious about building a high quality DAC.

Charles