Topic: Thanks, Observations, and maybe 1 minor weakness
2 weeks of ADI DAC ownership in and WOW. Just feel compelled to say thanks to RME for making such a great device - as far as I can tell, totally unique in the hifi world.
Also, big thanks to the forum members - great resource with most questions and topics covered (going beyond the excellent manual) and a fast response to my noob questions.
Some observations...
Out of the box sounded great on factory defaults. I thought my system was very transparent before but immediately heard all sorts of new content, and very good untangling of layered complex music.
Then I tweaked the EQ a bit based on what my ears thought would be about right. Fiddled with filters (My preference = slow for rock, sharp for everything else) Wonderful stuff, literal tears flowing hearing some of my favourite tracks anew.
Then I decided to get a bit more scientific and downloaded audiotools and got to work. Ouch - my fancy system (and family oriented room arrangement) has a pretty sketchy frequency response. Then I suffered a horrible psycho-audio effect, hearing the sound was suddenly not very good based on the graphs I was seeing.... after an initial wtf moment, turns out 5 band PEQ can do almost anything when you can freely control frequency, gain and quality, independet for each channel. So it was a remarkably quick job to get a pretty flat frequency response at my listening point.
Aaaaand, turns out my 'audiophile ears' are not all that honest, and really dont like treble above maybe 10 khz. Dunno why, but the ADI DAC can fix that, so back to the EQ, and adjusting the treble of the dynamic loudness (BTW dynamic loudness is incredible, though I have found it a bit disconcerting - with dynamic loudness and zero audible noise I find I cant quite tell how loud I have the music, as I guess my brain was using clues other than just sound level to work that out)
Anyway, now I have it all tuned back in to my quirky ears, so I can mostly ignore the DAC and enjoy the music.
One weakness? Well I bought this device because I enjoy fiddling with hifi, and if I play a track thats not quite mastered how I think it should be I have a bit of an urge to tweak some settings here and there to put it right... I think I need to learn to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. But maybe thats my weakness and not the DAC.
Thanks again to RME from one happy listener