Digital Processor Reviews

Give me Liberty or give me Kalista :-) .............

Try a Martin DRS2, beautiful sounding, a little dark, really well set up.

DACs are not much differing in perceivable performance. Even Jason Stoddard has mentioned that DACs are boring. ( I think he's right )

It seems like Audiophile's mostly 24k Golden Ears struggle to describe significant performance differences in DACs.

Tyll's 2015 "Big Sound" Event in Montana had nobody pointing out one DAC as the Outperforming Design ( including the often praised but dirt cheap Yggy from Schiit ).

It seems to make sense that this $1000 DAC will please about as much as any other DAC out there.

I like the Mytek Liberty, I'd like it more if it were named the Warsaw but not enough to be inspired to impulse "Buy-It-Now". hmm.

Thanks for tell'n us about it.

Tony in Michigan

Dudley, you review overpriced audio gear—gear that is the epitome of bling. Some self reflection in the future please, if you can manage. Thank you.

is almost a sacrilege when referring to a swearing..

Dudley, thanks for your enjoyable review. I'm getting more and more interested in this DAC - you obviously like it.

But here's the problem....you did what most audio reviewers do, hoping nobody notices. Instead of comparing the Liberty with key competitors that anyone would cross-shop if they were in the market for the Liberty, you pick out a couple of irrelevant DAC's waaaaay outside the Liberty's bracket.

No comparison to Border Patrol, or RME, or appropriate Schiit models for example. And we all know why, don't we? You'd have to start ranking them, and that would obviously make the unfavored brands unhappy. So instead of that you do what you always do - you say something like "....it's almost as good as xxx brand costing more than twice as much." So everyone's happy, right?

No hurt feelings. Everyone's a winner.

The trouble is, it makes the whole exercise a pointless sham - don't you agree?

Go on - tell us what you really think about this DAC. Be dangerous.

Mr. Dudley, a Editor for Stereophile Magazine, has years of experience writing articles and reviews. I like reading his articles, and find them informative. Art (Arthur) is his name, in case readers missed it.

A good DAC really opens up the sound at the front end of your system.
Done right it puts life into the music.
Done poorly it wrecks everything that comes after it in your chain.
MQA is the new decoding scheme which Tidal in particular brings into your home---sometimes as a better sound if the stars are aligned.
This Mytek DAC is relatively affordable and does many things very well, including a low cost entry into all things MQA.
I will buy one as one of my internet systems is due for an update.
Thanks Art.
Nice review.

I'm currently using a Metrum Acoustics Octave NOS dac. Is this the Mytek dac a better step up?

I love this test signal: "a crosspicking pattern in which two downstrokes are played in rapid succession, followed by a similarly rapid upstroke; the first note in each pair of downstrokes is played as a rest stroke—the plectrum comes to rest, however briefly, against the adjacent string as the note is played—giving that note a distinctive attack."

Most audio specifications are obsessed with frequency and spectrum, which is the defining characteristic of vowels or their musical equivalents, tones. Frequency spectrum implies a continuous, repetitive waveform idealized as superposition of sinusoids. (Fourier math only works if you integrate time from negative infinity to positive infinity, have infinite resolution and keep the complex phase space information intact)

Music, like speech, devotes 95% of the time and energy to vowels/tones; but the signalling information content of the other 5% is at least as important. These sounds are the consonants: how the tones start, stop and transition. Accurate reproduction of the musical expression means getting the waveforms and timing of the consonants correct, even when they are a fraction of a millisecond.

It is in this relatively un-explored area that many audio debates fall: analog vs. digital, SS vs. Tube and metal vs. fabric domes, high order vs. low order crossovers. Anti-aliasing makes it nearly impossible to follow musical consonants to the limits of hearing resolution digitally (around 3 microseconds). This is where over-sampling and ultra-low jitter come in, plus any other mathemagic discovered at Mytek, dcs, etc.

OTOH, CD aficionados have trained their hearing to pre-ringing and other digital artifacts that are "impossible to hear" according to the prevalent machine model of hearing, which has been distorting audiological research for 150 years since Helmholtz declared the cilia acted like tuning forks.

For that matter, every knob, function and plug-in that changes the sound of the signal inherently introduces temporal distortion. All processing, whether analog or digital, has to conflate more than one point in time of the original microphone signal and changes the waveforms of consonants. This is temporal distortion.

Audiophiles learned to by-pass tone controls, and yet practically all recordings use equalization, dynamic modification or delay operations (reverb and echo). All of these distort the musical consonants.

In fact, the act of mixing two microphone signals together or splitting one signal into left and right (panning) distorts the consonants and any natural reverb present in the recording; so mixing and mastering are distortion.

Kudos for escaping this vicious circle! Have to check out that recording.