I was going to put this in digital but given my perspective, analog & vinyl might be the place.
I'm a die-hard vinyl guy and only begrudgingly got to making digital a regular part of my in-home listening by going the DSD route, where all digital goes to an SDM chipped DSD capable DAC as DSD5.6 (128). For me, this is the most ‘analog' sounding digital I could find (or at least ‘afford') and it's good enough that I can enjoy it right along with vinyl even if a turntable remains ‘my' benchmark.
Now that my in-system digital playback suits me (via DSD), I'm finding that how ‘good' it does is really down to the source material which can be great (or very bad) right from pcm 16/44.1 on up to DSD5.6. Some of the best digital material I have heard however, is of the analog master > DSD2.8 or 5.6 variety and surprisingly, vinyl rips to DSD5.6. Maybe vinyl>DSD5.6 just ‘suits' my listening biases as you are capturing much of what I love about the sound of vinyl with an analog-like (colored?) digital encoding technique, which is just fine by me if it sounds like my turntable, I'm good.
So I've been wanting to try ripping vinyl to DSD ever since hearing the results, but the cost of experimenting with this was pretty high and limited to the somewhat inconvenient (to me) Tascam DA-3000 or the now discontinued Korg MR-2000S both well above my $ threshold for something I might not like. Korg's new introduction of the $600 (USD) DS-DAC-10R changed this however, and a recent Cosmo Music store sale had me diving in to see what was possible.
The DS-DAC-10R is an interesting piece; it uses the same ADC chipset as the MR-2000S to record straight to DSD (or PCM), functions as a ‘pure' DSD2.8 or 5.6 DAC, and has a headphone jack and selectable internal phono EQ, allowing a turntable to be plugged straight into its analog inputs with no need for an external phono-stage. Purchase also gives you the full license for Korg's Audiogate4 application that does all of the necessary recording, track splitting, tagging and playback functions even format conversion from PCM>DSD or DSD>PCM if desired. Since I don't want to do any digital clean-up or manipulation just record the analog everything remains in the DSD domain with no trips to PCM and back; something that was pretty important to me.
Out of the box, it appears to be a very well made piece; a substantial lump of aluminum with a copper sub-chassis and styling that…leaves me cold. It probably wouldn't bother me too much except for the overly bright ring of fire around the headphone volume knob that radiates in different colors based on function and what it ‘sees' as digital input. I feel like I should be wearing a lead bib around this thing.
For my use, I set the 10R to line input direct (no phono EQ) I wanted to capture what I like about the Zyx MC on the Sonic-Frontiers phono stage so kept it in play, plugged directly into the Korg with some Van Den Hul cables. The 10R is hooked up to my player PC with a Wireworld Starlight 7 USB cable, Uptone Audio REGEN and home-made ‘hard' USB adapter. Since the Korg is USB powered, this arrangement puts the Korg on my linear/regulated lab power supply which powers the REGEN. This setup doesn't sound quite as good in my system for playback as the Sotm SMS-100 streamer running HQPlayer's NAA, but USB direct is needed to do recording.
The Korg only has a few hours on it and no NAA so it's not fair to be too critical about playback yet, but I don't think it's quite up to the Concero HD/NAA when fed DSD5.6 via HQPlayer. It's real close, and if I didn't A-B them in rapid succession it might be hard to pick a favorite but let's say it's a work in progress from a purely DAC perspective. With some burn in hours (for what that's worth) or after putting it on the SMS-100 streamer things may improve a bit so we'll see.
As an ADC for ripping vinyl though oh man this is an exciting piece! My first ‘hack' at a recording was done by just queuing up what I had on the table (Muddy Water's Folk Singer), pressing Record in Audiogate, adjusting recording levels and letting it run for a few tracks. The resulting file (DSD5.6 dsf) went to a generic place on the hard drive and was given a cryptic name - 1 long file for the session. I pointed Roon at this new location to ‘watch', the cryptic file came up as ‘unknown' DSD128, pushed Play and…
Amazing it was like I still had the record playing. There was depth, the big airy soundscape, the ‘bite' of the guitar without the digital edge, the big tone and soaring vocals almost all I love about this record was now playing out of the much maligned ‘computer junk' in my room. Sure, this might just be ‘my' personally colored rendition as-per my chosen vinyl front end but that's exactly what I was after I want my digits to sound like my turntable and it seems to work.
I've gotten a little better with the workflow I'll clean the LP on the VPI machine, set recording levels, start the rip, add the artist and album tags as it goes, pause to change sides and finish out the file. I'll then go in and add ‘breaks' between cuts and add track names as I go, export the files to an ‘album name' folder and move it off to my network attached file server. Roon picks it up, identifies it, adds artwork and all the Roon value-add stuff and it's now part of my regular library, ready to playback as native DSD5.6.
Much more to dive into here with lots of variables, options and tweaking to come but my first few rips have pulled me into just listening to the music like digital has rarely done before. I'm going to try a few albums where I have them in several formats to get a good read on ultimate quality potential here but in the end, this is mostly about getting all my valuable (to me) vinyl into a format that lets me enjoy it more both in my listening room and everywhere else I listen to music.
So far, so good.
I'm a die-hard vinyl guy and only begrudgingly got to making digital a regular part of my in-home listening by going the DSD route, where all digital goes to an SDM chipped DSD capable DAC as DSD5.6 (128). For me, this is the most ‘analog' sounding digital I could find (or at least ‘afford') and it's good enough that I can enjoy it right along with vinyl even if a turntable remains ‘my' benchmark.
Now that my in-system digital playback suits me (via DSD), I'm finding that how ‘good' it does is really down to the source material which can be great (or very bad) right from pcm 16/44.1 on up to DSD5.6. Some of the best digital material I have heard however, is of the analog master > DSD2.8 or 5.6 variety and surprisingly, vinyl rips to DSD5.6. Maybe vinyl>DSD5.6 just ‘suits' my listening biases as you are capturing much of what I love about the sound of vinyl with an analog-like (colored?) digital encoding technique, which is just fine by me if it sounds like my turntable, I'm good.
So I've been wanting to try ripping vinyl to DSD ever since hearing the results, but the cost of experimenting with this was pretty high and limited to the somewhat inconvenient (to me) Tascam DA-3000 or the now discontinued Korg MR-2000S both well above my $ threshold for something I might not like. Korg's new introduction of the $600 (USD) DS-DAC-10R changed this however, and a recent Cosmo Music store sale had me diving in to see what was possible.
The DS-DAC-10R is an interesting piece; it uses the same ADC chipset as the MR-2000S to record straight to DSD (or PCM), functions as a ‘pure' DSD2.8 or 5.6 DAC, and has a headphone jack and selectable internal phono EQ, allowing a turntable to be plugged straight into its analog inputs with no need for an external phono-stage. Purchase also gives you the full license for Korg's Audiogate4 application that does all of the necessary recording, track splitting, tagging and playback functions even format conversion from PCM>DSD or DSD>PCM if desired. Since I don't want to do any digital clean-up or manipulation just record the analog everything remains in the DSD domain with no trips to PCM and back; something that was pretty important to me.
Out of the box, it appears to be a very well made piece; a substantial lump of aluminum with a copper sub-chassis and styling that…leaves me cold. It probably wouldn't bother me too much except for the overly bright ring of fire around the headphone volume knob that radiates in different colors based on function and what it ‘sees' as digital input. I feel like I should be wearing a lead bib around this thing.
For my use, I set the 10R to line input direct (no phono EQ) I wanted to capture what I like about the Zyx MC on the Sonic-Frontiers phono stage so kept it in play, plugged directly into the Korg with some Van Den Hul cables. The 10R is hooked up to my player PC with a Wireworld Starlight 7 USB cable, Uptone Audio REGEN and home-made ‘hard' USB adapter. Since the Korg is USB powered, this arrangement puts the Korg on my linear/regulated lab power supply which powers the REGEN. This setup doesn't sound quite as good in my system for playback as the Sotm SMS-100 streamer running HQPlayer's NAA, but USB direct is needed to do recording.
The Korg only has a few hours on it and no NAA so it's not fair to be too critical about playback yet, but I don't think it's quite up to the Concero HD/NAA when fed DSD5.6 via HQPlayer. It's real close, and if I didn't A-B them in rapid succession it might be hard to pick a favorite but let's say it's a work in progress from a purely DAC perspective. With some burn in hours (for what that's worth) or after putting it on the SMS-100 streamer things may improve a bit so we'll see.
As an ADC for ripping vinyl though oh man this is an exciting piece! My first ‘hack' at a recording was done by just queuing up what I had on the table (Muddy Water's Folk Singer), pressing Record in Audiogate, adjusting recording levels and letting it run for a few tracks. The resulting file (DSD5.6 dsf) went to a generic place on the hard drive and was given a cryptic name - 1 long file for the session. I pointed Roon at this new location to ‘watch', the cryptic file came up as ‘unknown' DSD128, pushed Play and…
Amazing it was like I still had the record playing. There was depth, the big airy soundscape, the ‘bite' of the guitar without the digital edge, the big tone and soaring vocals almost all I love about this record was now playing out of the much maligned ‘computer junk' in my room. Sure, this might just be ‘my' personally colored rendition as-per my chosen vinyl front end but that's exactly what I was after I want my digits to sound like my turntable and it seems to work.
I've gotten a little better with the workflow I'll clean the LP on the VPI machine, set recording levels, start the rip, add the artist and album tags as it goes, pause to change sides and finish out the file. I'll then go in and add ‘breaks' between cuts and add track names as I go, export the files to an ‘album name' folder and move it off to my network attached file server. Roon picks it up, identifies it, adds artwork and all the Roon value-add stuff and it's now part of my regular library, ready to playback as native DSD5.6.
Much more to dive into here with lots of variables, options and tweaking to come but my first few rips have pulled me into just listening to the music like digital has rarely done before. I'm going to try a few albums where I have them in several formats to get a good read on ultimate quality potential here but in the end, this is mostly about getting all my valuable (to me) vinyl into a format that lets me enjoy it more both in my listening room and everywhere else I listen to music.
So far, so good.
