Even better than my Sonicake?
I like Bricasti but I would prefer this less expensive one from the Professional Line:
Matt
LiquidSonics Reverberate has a very nice Bricasti simulation/emulation for a pluginā¦
Actual measurements show lowest distortion at DSD512 for a number of DACs with Audirvanaās filter and modulators. Iāll take hard numbers over marketing (even from Bricasti, which makes lovely DACs), thank you.
Edit: The measurements Iāve seen were done with DACs that were not DSD1024 capable, so I donāt have numbers for comparison there.
Jud,
do you have a link to these measurements?
Thx
Matt
Iād posted a couple of links in another topic here. Let me see if I can find that comment. If not, Iāll look for the original source pages in another forum.
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@Jud
Spare us the futile attempt at trying to be rightā¦ show us there is contextually tangible audible characteristics, that are conveyed via DSD512 and DSD1024 modulated iterations of a lower sample-rate DSD256 recording, as perceived by a cross-section of human-being audiophiles.
Hi Matt -
Links to the measurements:
https://community.audirvana.com/t/dac-delta-sigma-vs-r2r-which-do-you-prefer/36493/92?u=jud
https://community.audirvana.com/t/dac-delta-sigma-vs-r2r-which-do-you-prefer/36493/95?u=jud
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As the graphs show, this business about the DAC ārunning at the red lineā is horse hockey. āRunning at the red lineā would imply more noise and distortion, and in the graphs we see conclusively there is less. (It makes perfect sense if you understand whatās going on inside the DAC. With some DACs the workload with DSD256 or DSD512 input is less, because the DAC chip doesnāt have to do the upsampling and modulation steps. With other DACs, the workload is very much the same as other inputs. If these things were not true, those graphs would look quite different.)
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@matt read the whole thread to keep it in contextā¦
Yes, yes, yesā¦ weāve been down this roadā¦ I will take the onboard Bricasti DSP any day over my MBP running r8Brainā¦ A dedicated ASIC or FPGA is hard to beat in softwareā¦
Edit:
The Bricasti 8x up-sampling will take a DXD (352.8kHz) file to 2.8MHz ā¦ Iāll take their filtering DSP over r8Brain any dayā¦
At the last or second-last RMAF, a friend whoās a designer for Sonore played a recording of his girlfriend, a singer. Of course he knew her voice intimately, and he knew the session details down to the mic used, The system he played it through used an amplifier heād built and a lovely Bricasti DAC. And oh yes, he chose to use Audirvanaās upsampling rather than the Bricasti DSP after doing measurements and listening closely.
Of course itās just one person and what does he know, right? 
He knows his preferencesā¦
Still doesnāt qualify the DSD12 vs DSD256 statementsā¦
Indeed, software upsampling with a computer can beat, indeed, any DSP of any DAC. In this regard, the DSP of a DAC is always a compromise. It willnever be able to run the optimal algorithms.
I canāt say for r8Brain vs the Bricasti, but some modulators of HQPlayer are so CPU demanding that even a M1 Mac can not do more than DSD256 with them.
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Same with Audirvanaās filters and modulators. CPUs are far more capable than FPGAs and ASICs, otherwise theyād put FPGAs and ASICs in computers. The reason CPUs (or GPUs, which would also be very suitable) arenāt used in DACs is simply expense.
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You are completely right.
The impossibility to put a gaming PC inside the DAC pushed the designers of high-end DACs to engineer them to work at low frequencies of DSD, and high-grade, expensive electronics. A Nagra HD DAC is limited to DSD128, but it costs ā¬25,000!
With its FPGA, the Dave is an exception among them, but itās the only high-end DAC that is supposed to reach its optimal performance with an external upsampler (the MScaler). And even the MScaler can not match software DSP by a computer.
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Please provide a link for this claim, afaik this is not correct.
Matt
Yeah, heās got his PCM and delta-sigma processing mixed up.