Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Guides, Testimonials, News



We've just received a letter from a customer from Switzerland about his experience with the e38 Mark II DAC. The e38 is used in advanced digital crossover / room correction setup:

I was able to play around with e38 MKII incl. the Teddy power supply today and must say it is fantastic.

I am using DIY 4-way fully active dipoles in a stereo setup without any baffles: 21 inch woofer from 18Sound, 6,5 inch Seas woven polymer cone midbass, the legendary Fostex FS 21 midrange and the matching Fostex F7 tweeter as a dipole without the horn and back cover. Music is streaming only via the latest version of JRiver and all active filtering and EQ-ing is done with Acourate and linear phase filters.

I am mentioning this because with my previous multi-DAC setup (really not cheap stuff either) I had noise and humble problems at low levels because of the high amount of equalization applied to the bass and midbass drivers since they are just mounted on a few beam supports without any baffles as mentioned above. All noise is gone with the e38.

My fear was that it would sound less lively (the system sounds pretty much like a horn speaker without the harmonic distortions) or less smooth, or less detailed (the Fostexes resolution is amazing also by today's standards) compared to my previous equipment but this is not at all the case. Pretty amazing since I traded 4 stereo DACs and a special 8-channel sound card into just one little box plus power supply.

Besides the sound I really enjoy the usability of the e38 MKII: I can measure via Acourate and a studio USB soundcard and route the sweep signals via JRiver straight into the e38MKII which means my measurement path is exactly like my audio pass. This is very convenient since I don't need to re-wire any equipment between measuring or listening to music. Furthermore the volume plug-in is a nice feature since it helps to avoid measurements at unintended levels because of different volume settings in different equipment or software.

I did have some trouble setting up JRiver as an ASIO device in Acourate but this was related to the 8-channel card in my PC and not to the e38MKII. exaSounds customer support provided me with help in a very professional and skilled manner. All in all I would say the e38MKII together with the Teddy power supply is the best choice for fully active speaker setups with crossovers and filters running in realtime on a PC. It's cool to whatch 8 channels being convolved at 384 kHz with 32 Bit resolution. This is a quality level (maybe a bit exagerated to some) that is very difficult to obtain and match with passive speakers.

Thanks again for the outstanding support George!

Best regards
U.S., Rheineck, Switzerland

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