So, with that concern out of the way, how big of a difference is there between the MScaler vs native input? With perhaps a slight edge to the mscaler even. I imagine the reason it does this even when NOT oversampling is exactly to prevent what I mentioned, having people accuse them of "faking" improvement by increasing volume when swapping modes.Ībsolutely identical. But the mscaler will need to attenuate before oversampling and then passing the signal to the DAC. Most DACs will have this as part of their internal oversampling. Oversampling requires digital headroom to prevent clipping. This was unexpected, but also makes sense. I played a few tracks and swapped between USB and MScaler input, and the first thing I noticed, the MScaler was quieter. To check that, I just connected dave by USB, and also Dual-BNC to the mscaler. So, first thing I wanted to do was of course check that the MScaler wasn't intentionally or unintentionally harming quality without any upsampling (which the cynical side of me thought that this could potentially be done to give the illusion of improvement when actually the MScaler's "bypass" mode was simply worse). Hifiman Susvara headphones (Also used Arya and HD800S but for the most part susvara) When connecting to the MScaler, Dual-BNC was used on the chord dacs with shawline digital BNC cables.
The MScaler was connected to my PC using an ifi Igalvanic 3.0.Īll of these devices have galvanic isolation anyway, but hey, might as well just in case. When using a DAC without MScaler it was connected via an SMS200 Ultra Neo with SPS500 PSU. I try to avoid DSP volume control wherever possible, but as you'll see shortly, its clear that it didn't hold the bigger dacs back so it didn't interfere with the test. (Volume matched to 0.1dB using motu M2 ADC) Volume matching was done with roon DSP to keep things even and fair. All DACs were grouped together in Roon so that they were all playing the same thing at the same time. To test this, I used an XLR switch to quickly switch between DACs with 0 delay. (If you have any other questions you want answered, ask and i'll do my best to answer)
Difference MScaler makes on a chord vs non-chord dac MScaler performance as DDC only (no upsampling) Qutest + MScaler combo vs Dave (Can you get DAVE performance for half the price?) I had a few questions I wanted to answer: