Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

As I told before I picked recently a new interesting DAC and I got for it some AES/EBU cables. That made me to make the same Bidat vs. Lavry experiments only to use the AES/EBU interface with Lavry Gold.  During those experiments I did not use Synopsis S/PIDIF with Bidat and it would set all bets off and use AES/EBU Bidat as well.

It looks like Lavry sounds way better with AES/EBU that is not surprise as pro use is the Lavry’s primary duty. I opened Lavry and discovered that it looks like that Lavry’s S/PIDIF input used one more input gain stage AES/EBU compare to AES/EBU… Might be that is why or perhaps the AES/EBU is juts better, particularly for higher sampling rate.

What however surprised me was the Sound. Though Lavry with AES/EBU sound better then with S/PIDIF  I still found, identically to what I did 2 years back, that the damn Bidat still much more preferably when it driven by CEC TL0. I have all desire in the world to found Lavry as a winner – that would reduce complexity of my installation and would allow me to use one DAC for all my digital. Lavry has 2 digital automatically switchable inputs – one for CD transport and one for my DAW – it would be perfect to have one DAC for everything! Unfortunately the sound of the damn Bidat still forces me to keep that DAC in the system, using extra cable, extra preamp inputs and extra space within my rack.

This is a shame as Lavry is unquestionable much better DAC. It is very properly implemented multibit that do everything much better then Bidat. Although Bidat is not a simple Delta-Sigma but has in real time switchable processing algorithm depending of Music speed but still the Lavry’s pure multibit, with all it’s resistors switching and constant self-recalibration should be way more advanced. In fact it is more advanced. Lavry has way better lover bass, it lot more extended at higher frequencies. Still Lavvy is loosing the battle as my “transport DAC”… I think the Bidat’s output analog stage juts happens to “sound better” and it sets all apart. John Right told that after years of experiments he would 30 cents worth op-amp that do very good job. They are very common op-amp and they are nothing special themselves but in the way how they are used and applied in Bidat they reportedly sound “unique”. So, I do not know why my Bidat has that unbeatable sound. Is it the output stage, the cooking of the Bidat caps:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/GetPost.aspx?PostID=5032

… the Synopsis S/PIDIF interface, the idiosyncrasy of my transport or anything else. However, the Bidat still is my very preferred DAC for my 16/44 transport. Here are some aspects where the Bidat leads:

1) Tone. It is softer, sweeter and more “yellow”. It reminds in a way what Ortofone SPU needles do.

2) More saturated second harmonics then any other DACs I have heard.

3) Has larger performing space.

4) Has some absolutely exemplarily and unmatchable balance between sharpness of attacks and lower order harmonics.

5) Has very deferent type of HF nose – absolutely different then any other DAC – the Bidat noise does not bother me as mush and any other noise. (Synopsis?) The Bidet’s nose sound more like a tape hiss then like digital nose.

6) Absolutely amassing imaging, any other DAC I have use were not able to image properly in contexts of extreme nearfiled and in order to throw the right image other DACs wanted me to sit 2-3 feet back. Bidat can do it from the same extreme distance as my vinyl can do it.

Among the disadvantages I would name

1) Lower bass

2) 20 Bit and 44 kHz maximum. It reads 20 bit but it toss the 4 bit internally and in reality it posses 16Bit.

3) Too “fat” and too slow when it is not driven by CEC TL0

So, the coming new “investigational” DAC will still have the “old” contestant... Surely it will compete with Lavry as well but Lavry is solely my DAW DAC, where it does extremely good job.

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site