HiFimediy DACS

[prerich]

While I've posted about the new Emotiva Ego DAC's - I haven't had an opportunity to try them. However, I've had the pleasure to use another small product - the HiFiMediy Asynchronous 9018m DAC.

This product surprised me, number one - it was a gift from my spouse, number 2 its price ($89), and finally....it's drivers!!!!!!

We have all heard the excellent reviews of equipment that use the ESS Saber 32 - 9018 DAC chip and this little gem is no slouch either. I pitted it against my more costly Essence ST sound card with opamp upgrades and it fared quite well!!

The Essence had an advantage due to its opamp upgrades (covered in post review), but the $89 HiFimediy had it's advantages also - USB operation, asynchronous operation - being much quieter than the Essence.

I would have to say that both of them performed almost identical to each other....except the C-media sound processor prevents PCM 1792A DAC in the Essence from doing DSD!!!!!! Check and mate!!!!

The HiFimediy is capable of upsampling (32bit and 384khz and all the oddball sample rates in between). I experimented with upsampling just to see how the drivers handled it - and the drivers are written very well indeed!!! No crashes, no dropouts. I checked windows to verify if it was indeed 32bit and whatever sample rate I chose and it registered correctly. Needless to say when I listen to music - I listen through the 9018m now.

This is not a review of the product - this is just little notice for those that might be interested in trying a little DAC for very little money, but it does transmit that "musicians are in the room" feeling! What's even better .... My birthday isn't until this month!!!! I got to play with it two weeks early!!!!

I'm thinking about buying one just to mod (Yep - another Burson project)!!!!!
AT $89 a pop, the opamp will cost almost as much as the DAC!!!!!!