My first impressions of the MHDT Orchid NOS tube DAC:
After an arduous wait (the UPS guy didn’t arrive until 9:45 PM Monday night). I’ve set up the MHDT Orchid and am letting it burn in.
I’m using a Raspberry PI and Allo DigiOne as my transport using the S/PIDF Coax connector.
https://www.allo.com/sparky/digione.html. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to have a noisy USB output but the DigiOne uses the I2S connection, has a galvanic isolator to lower background noise and the DigiOne uses double reclocking of the S/PDIF stream to reduce jitter (one of them taking care of metastability (whatever that is?) and the second one taking care of realigning the data). I’m using Volumio software which includes the DigiOne driver so during the setup wizard, I chose the DigeOne as the I2s DAC/Transport had it working right out of the box.
My previous DAC was the Allo Piano 2.1 with the KALI reclocker board.
https://www.allo.com/sparky/bundle-kali-piano-2-1.html The Piano 2.1 uses 2 PCM5142 DAC chips which allowed me to run each channel on separate chips, dual mono. I thought it sounded comparable to the other Over Sampling DACs I’ve heard.
I mainly listen to female vocals, duets and vocal harmonies usually with an acoustic background and am sensitive to what I call glare. On many of the DACs I’ve heard when a singer increases her volume on a note it takes on an almost “autotune” characteristic on the leading edge of note that is very unnatural. The Allo Piano 2.1 was OK most of the time but I didn’t notice it at all on my brief listen to the MHDT Orchid. Vocals were very realistic and pleasant. The violins (/ fiddles) had that woody sound to them that was absent on the Piano DAC and they weren’t screechy at all. (Big Improvement) The background vocals were much more prevalent and easier to understand and to me even the trumpet sounded more like a trumpet, like it was coming from a brass horn instead of just a trumpet sounding device. (Not to this extreme but it was more like a real instrument instead of one from a synthesizer.) The MHDT Orchid has a similar type of presentation that Melvin described of the Pagoda as not as forward as the Piano 2.1 with a very different presentation, like I was listening to it in a very dead sounding room. (I’m wondering if this is the NOS sound people refer to?)
My wife keeps asking “Are you happy?” and you know…. I think I am. I’ll know more after a month or two when the tube is supposed to have burned in and I’ve spent some quality time with the artists I need to listen to.