Gadgetory

today we have the alaric Vega dak this unit runs for around three thousand five hundred dollars so it's a little bit on the pricier side full size full capability digital deck and preamplifier as well only a single knob is on the front of this unit it controls all the separate sub menus that are available it's it's actually quite a great knob it's weighted perfectly and spins great you push it in to turn it on you push the button again and hold it to turn it off into sleep mode the unit actually contains a femto clock which is accurate down to a very very small increment of a single second and that helps with jitter reduce jitter and also you know it helps with the up sampling in this case this one actually up samples all PCM streams to the megahertz so this was a pretty complex little machine actually has USB and does DSD natively as well which is kind of a fun feature that a lot of other decks don't have until you get into this price range it does DSD 64 as well as DSD 128 and also of course does all the regular high res style of music including 24 bit 192 and others it has a digital only inputs as a preamplifier so you can't actually stick another analog source into this and use it as a full preamp however if digital is the to go for you this thing's got a pretty good substantial amount of inputs to either act as a deck or a preamp alone you can this can drive directly into a powered amp and then be controlled by the volume knob you can see here we have the USB input on the far right tosh link underneath that - coaxial aes next to that and then on the left side we have our balanced and unbalanced output so pretty pretty diverse for digital input and pretty simple going out nothing too overly complicated on the back here as you can see there's no input selector directly located on the front of this I'm just going to take you through some of the menus here real quick on this device as it kind of gives you a more a better idea of the feature set you can see the input is still selected here from usb this will change depend on what input you select and then also it has your readout here which is very handy that allows you to see what the incoming bitrate is for the file you're playing it also switches to DSD 64 or DSD 128 depending on if that's coming in or not this also acts as a volume control for the output in the back there a handy one through a hundred if you click in like so it brings you the first menu you can see this pretty clearly you can see that the input is actually the number one option on this first entry here when you click in you can then see the ability to switch between each of these Toslink coax and the AES and the USB is right there if I were to select a yes you can see that the signal the I'm sorry the sign changes there to allow you to see kind of what your you're dealing with it's fun that it's an actual icon not just lit up words you can see here there's also balance control phase control you can invert that if you so desire this year number four is kind of a unique and cool feature for the device the filter as you click in this one actually allows you to have four separate ones that you can cater to your own tastes the default is for my preference was also four but during some trouble hot music I did find some nice accompaniment with the mode three so my preference was for for the most part and three if you are looking to do more trouble hot listening but for the most part I stuck with the default four when you're in this mode and DS DS beings sent to this this menu will actually change and have just mode five and six six being the default that I also stuck with for most of my listening for DSD so that menu automatically changes when you're running DSD so there's a two additional modes for that type of listening if you dive down into the system here you can actually see a few more options you can change the display if you want put it into sleep the most interesting feature on this menu however is the clock now this corresponds to the femto clock that is located inside here which is actually uses a type of crystal that needs to be temperature regulated to perform its best so as this machine warms up in standby mode you have the capability to lock it in two different clocking capabilities the first one that you get and that's what the stage it is in right now is only to auto and course because this is still warming up the crystal in that warm up phase you you will have these two select options okay so we've had a little bit of time to let this thing warm up I'm going to show you what it looks like when we go into this clock setting here and this is like I said before directly related to the femto clock inside you see here now the settings have changed after it's been you know regulated to the correct temperature we have course fine and exact exact being the best and you can click to lock that in and now there's an extra dot illuminated here to show you that it's been calibrated to exact use the highest use of it of the DAC system you can alleviate the warmup time by just putting the unit into standby mode which is located by pressing this button in and going to sleep so in this standby mode that you see now you will it actually continues to warm the crystal so if you don't turn it off all the way like you did what I had to move it in here you should be fine and this is just a quick shot of the final menu here so overall this deck was extremely extremely transparent in there my full review on the website I mentioned it crosses over T and dots every eye it's really meticulous in the way it reproduces things the DSD proved kind of had the smoothest edge of all the file types that I listened to you can it's so transparent in a way that allows you to kind of see here the grain in lower recordings and lower fidelity so it's very revealing it lets you know what things really sound like really kind of get you close to that edge it puts things closer to you than other Dax do when I was doing some critical listening I noticed the compared to some of the other budget decks that the singer would appear four to five feet away with the other decks whereas this DAC it was literally whispering in your ear so there's some really exceptional performance when it comes to that type of closeness intimacy articulation and natural smooth presentation that's kind of where this meets both fields you got really great detail on one side and really organic natural sound on the other and this is right in the middle of the road there it's a very nice combination of natural sound presentation with really great fine detail that allows you to hear everything that's we had on the recording you're listening to so those are very nice very nice features very nice culmination of those two kind of other ends so all in all I really like this and like the stack the price is you know cup there with the rest of the high fidelity equipment in the DAC market you know that it's constantly changing the DSD is a relatively new file type that's kind of cropped up as of late so things are constantly changing which makes purchasing a deck all the more tough but if you're in the market for something like this and you have the money to burn this is definitely one to check out in this price range it's wonderful little device it really plays well and acts pretty good as a preamp as well this is the Alaric Vega DAC wonderful piece of machinery I also enjoy it very much let me know if you guys have any questions comments you can leave them in the youtube section there and also subscribe to the YouTube channel if you like this kind of thing thank you so much guys have a great one