Auralic Vega Thoughts

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Hey all,

I received the Auralic Vega to try out for a week. To say I was absolutely bowled over would be an understatement.

Much as I hate to admit it, this all in one solution for any file format, handily trumped my reference. The Bel Canto DAC3.5VB MKII and Bel Canto Reflink stack.

What's better? Just about everything. Space between artists, depth layering, big soundstage, image focus, bass, ambient resolution, musical flow.... The Vega did it all here, and is musical while doing it. Very non digital and beautiful sounding. It's most notable strengths over the Bel Canto's are fluidity, vocal reproduction, and ambient resolution. It really nails em. The only thing the Bel Canto edges it out on is inner detail, and this is very slight. The Vega bests it in all the more important areas that pertain to musicality.

I did comparisons mostly with PCM, as the Bel Canto does only that. You cannot say the Vega is a great DSD DAC, and an Ok PCM Dac. It is just plain ass great on everything. And it is almost half the price of the BC DAC/Reflink.

DSD was a real treat as well. Giving up very little slam, yet giving a more wholesome and bigger organic sound compared to PCM.

There is one but....
You must use this DAC with the balanced outputs to realize what it is capable of. MUST! The unbalanced output does not come close. Reason being, the RCA outputs are not utilizing the Orfeo output stage at all, and are opamp driven. The difference here is not subtle. I believe anyone that has a problem with the sound of this DAC is not running it balanced out.

Being that I run tube amps with unbalanced inputs, I ran balanced out of the Vega to my homemade 1+1:1+1 transformers, wired to convert balanced to unbalanced. Sort of a transformer buffer between the Vega and amps. This worked like a freakin charm. Great solution, but you gotta use good expensive transformers to pull this off properly and transparently. Jensen or Lundahl won't cut it here. I was also very impressed with its preamp duties. However, I will attribute this to the marriage of the high output current the Vega has on tap, and the transformer buffers. Together, they produced magical results.

The Vega gives plenty of tinker options to play with. Most notably, selectable filters and clock modes. I kept the filter in default mode, as it was the obvious choice to me. I was also informed that running the clock on the Vega in exact mode requires a very low jitter source to remain stable. I ran exact here the whole time, and never had any issues, but YMMV. The other clock modes did make a difference, but exact gave the best image focus.

So, it is time to save up........ Very highly recommend this DAC. Looking at all the angles, it is a bargain.

Digital front end:
2009 Mac Mini (MC238) with SSD, 8G Ram, Snow Leopard, Optimization Tweaks, Amarra, Audirvana+, fed from outboard Paul Hynes SR5-18v5 supply
Totaldac USB Cable/Filter
 
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I saw an interview with the young designer Xuanqian Wang, about 6 months ago with Peter Breuninger. The guy is a genius in my book being a audio designer, audio and recording engineer as well as a pianist.
 
The AURALiC Vega would be my choice of DAC in this price range. I have an AURALiC Taurus Mk.II coming at the end of the month and am seriously considering building a system around AURALiC components for my next main system including their Merak mono amps.

Even though I recently bought a Mytek 192 DSD DAC, I've been considering picking up the Vega DAC as well.
 
Yep. It is crazy good using the balanced out to my transformers. It is going back tomorrow, and will be missed. For awhile :)
 
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