Phison Audio PD2 Preamp/DAC

Mivera Audio

Mivera Audio

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Mar 14, 2016
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414
Hi Guys,

The 6 moons review of the Phison Audio PD2 modular Preamp/DAC will be finished soon. So far there's only details on the design. If anyone has any questions please let me know, as I'm the North American distributor of Phison Audio line.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/phison/1.html

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joeinid said:
:exciting:

Looks great Mike!
Click to expand...

Thanks Joe. It's a killer unit. I had no plans to distribute 3rd party products as I'm developing my own, but when Sonny from Phison showed me this and the opportunity arouse, I figured I'd be a fool to pass it up :) Sonny has been doing work for OEM's for many years and decided to start the Phison line with his brother Phillip. All Phison gear is designed for a lifetime of ownership. All parts can be upgraded individually as technology progresses. Although the pricing is moderate for what you get due to distributor direct sales, it's not built to a price point. It's built to a quality standard which is the best Sonny know's how to do circa 2016.

To get the very best sound out of the unit, I use the DSD direct mode which bypasses the onboard DAC chip and uses discrete low pass filters for the purest DSD possible. For the best sounding PCM possible, I upsample all PCM to quad DSD with Hqplayer. I'll be releasing a companion server shortly that run's the Roon core, and uses Hqplayer to upsample all PCM to quad DSD. It will work like a black box turnkey device with no need to connect a monitor, keyboard or mouse to the unit. For the user interface, an Ipad, Android tablet, or laptop running the Roon app can be used. It can be used for your personal audio collection, and Tidal streaming all integrated in the Roon app. The server will also come bundled with a 1 year subscription of Tidal and Roon.

For vinyl lovers there's an optional SOTA fully discrete phono stage available as well.
 
I look forward to getting some opinions on the unit as they get into users hands.
 
joeinid said:
I look forward to getting some opinions on the unit as they get into users hands.
Click to expand...

Same here. You already know my first client, however he's waiting for the matching A2.120 amp before sharing impressions. He's very happy with it so far though. He's actually getting a new unit with an upgraded discrete modular DAC output stage board. It wasn't ready yet when he got his. There's also new filter options now that enable even better DSD sound. So he hasn't even heard the best from it yet :)
 
I trust his ears very much and know you've been spot on re: the Nord amps, so I am interested and look forward to your success. Seems like audio is getting better all the time. Exciting times.

Mivera Audio said:
Same here. You already know my first client, however he's waiting for the matching A2.120 amp before sharing impressions. He's very happy with it so far though. He's actually getting a new unit with an upgraded discrete modular DAC output stage board. It wasn't ready yet when he got his. There's also new filter options now that enable even better DSD sound. So he hasn't even heard the best from it yet :)
Click to expand...
 
Mivera Audio said:
I'll be releasing a companion server shortly that run's the Roon core, and uses Hqplayer to upsample all PCM to quad DSD. It will work like a black box turnkey device with no need to connect a monitor, keyboard or mouse to the unit. For the user interface, an Ipad, Android tablet, or laptop running the Roon app can be used. It can be used for your personal audio collection, and Tidal streaming all integrated in the Roon app. The server will also come bundled with a 1 year subscription of Tidal and Roon.
Click to expand...
Hey Mike - Your planned server sounds very intriguing! Any idea on its expected pricing? TIA
 
joeinid said:
I trust his ears very much and know you've been spot on re: the Nord amps, so I am interested and look forward to your success. Seems like audio is getting better all the time. Exciting times.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot Joe! And he's not an amateur when it comes to high end DAC's :) Yes it's getting better all of the time, and so will the PD2, modular board by modular board as technology advances. No more rat race, flavor of the month DAC. And if used with the companion server, the DAC engine is operating in software, so as Hqplayer is upgraded with new filter/modulator algorithims, so is the whole DAC. The DSD direct mode takes the bottleneck of the filtering/modulation preformed in DAC chips out of the picture. It's a shame Srajan won't have it for the 6 moons review. But at the same time I don't want to downplay the PCM performance when connected straight to a general purpose computer or streamer such as an Aurender. It's excellent as well. Just not as good.
 
A followup question regarding your planned server - will it have built in HD storage or USB connections for external drives?
 
audio.bill said:
Hey Mike - Your planned server sounds very intriguing! Any idea on its expected pricing? TIA
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Thanks Bill. The plan is to keep it under $2500. This way the entire package Server/streamer/upsampling engine/DAC/preamp is under $10000. All that will be missing to make it a complete turnkey system is an amp, set of interconnects, and speakers.
 
audio.bill said:
A followup question regarding your planned server - will it have built in HD storage or USB connections for external drives?
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It will have both USB type C and Thunderbolt 3 to connect external drives direct. Or files can be stored anywhere on the connected network on a NAS, or computer. Internally it will use an M.2 PCI-E drive for the OS. The PD2 has a SOTA next gen USB interface. It uses the best galvanic isolation and reclocking technology I've ever seen. So any of these uber quality, insanely priced servers/streamers on the market won't be an upgrade for this system. I also have a Ravenna Ethernet interface in the works as well. But I will discuss details on that once it's ready.
 
how do you think the DAC section will compare with Lampi GG in terms of sound/performance?

I had been very curious about this product..

:roflmao:
 
dimfer said:
how do you think the DAC section will compare with Lampi GG in terms of sound/performance?

I had been very curious about this product..

:roflmao:
Click to expand...

I haven't compared them personally. But the GG was my 1st client's previous DAC. He's very happy with his PD2.
 
Mike

While Srajen's method may not be optimal from your point of view, isn't that the same method he used with the DAC's from Metrum, Modwright, Aqua and others so the playing field is at least equal? My problem with Srajen isn't usually with his method, but rather finding the meat of the review and his "point" amongst all of the prose. Good guy though and a supporter of the "new and little guy" in the market.
 
Jack said:
Mike

While Srajen's method may not be optimal from your point of view, isn't that the same method he used with the DAC's from Metrum, Modwright, Aqua and others so the playing field is at least equal? My problem with Srajen isn't usually with his method, but rather finding the meat of the review and his "point" amongst all of the prose. Good guy though and a supporter of the "new and little guy" in the market.
Click to expand...

Not really because those are PCM DAC's that are designed to process PCM in a optimal fashion using their R2R DAC's. When you feed those DAC's PCM at it's native rate from any connected computer, you are getting the best PCM performance that is possible from the DAC. The PD2 does an excellent job with PCM when you feed it PCM, however it really shines with DSD. In my extensive research with DAC's I've found that the biggest reason DSD sounds better than PCM is simply how it's handled in the DAC. Since this DAC preforms best with DSD, using a very high quality PCM to DSD resampling engine like Hqplayer, takes PCM performance to level's far beyond what I've ever heard. Considering 99.9% of all digital music content available today is PCM, I think the PCM performance of a system is the most important. When used in conjunction with Hqplayer, it works very similar to the Emm labs, dCS DAC's, Playback designs, Ps audio directstream, Mola mola etc, only it handles the upsampling on a much more powerful computer CPU, rather than resource constrained FPGA inside the DAC. This allows not only for better algorithms, but also for very easy upgrading. As new and better algorithms are released for Hqplayer, the DAC also get's upgraded.
 
Jack said:
Mike

While Srajen's method may not be optimal from your point of view, isn't that the same method he used with the DAC's from Metrum, Modwright, Aqua and others so the playing field is at least equal? My problem with Srajen isn't usually with his method, but rather finding the meat of the review and his "point" amongst all of the prose. Good guy though and a supporter of the "new and little guy" in the market.
Click to expand...

+1

6moons does give the new players a fair shot at getting reviewed.

Since this DAC preforms best with DSD, using a very high quality PCM to DSD resampling engine like Hqplayer, takes PCM performance to level's far beyond what I've ever heard.
Click to expand...

Time for Jussi to get HQP on 6moons! HQP does have a Mac version .... so no problem there.
 
Nikhil said:
+1





Time for Jussi to get HQP on 6moons! HQP does have a Mac version .... so no problem there.
Click to expand...


Only problem is core audio is limited to DSD 128 over DoP. So a Mac is fine, but only if you use an NAA Ethernet renderer that runs on Linux. Doing it this way Hqplayer can handle up to DSD 1024 on a Mac.
 
Looks interesting. Any idea why the AK4490 was used instead of an FPGA or AK4497?

Also, what other DACs have your customers compared the PD2 with?
 
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