I have joined the DAVE club! It was my gift to myself this holiday season, and I’m not only very impressed with the DAVE, but was also really surprised by how the improvements manifested themselves as compared to my Hugo 2. I have very limited experience with rarified DACs, so I offer my 5-day impressions only in reference to upgrading from its smaller siblings.
I started my audiophile headphone journey with a Mojo pushing Utopias, and that was incredible to me. I was amazed at the detail the combo had. I eventually moved on to a Hugo 2, which to me, had obviously more detail, as well as better separation between voices - a supercharged Mojo. I expected a similar type of improvement in the DAVE - just even bigger.
The first thing I noticed was that there was obviously more detail, but it didn’t smack you in the face, which the previous two (Mojo / Hugo 2) did, a bit (in retrospect). The best analogy I can think of is that Mojo is like a solid PC doing one of those graphics rendering demos on a human character. “Whoa, cool, wrinkles and moving hair!” The Hugo 2 is like a high-end gaming PC doing the same. “Whoa, now I see shades of skin color, stubble, and individual hairs!” I thought DAVE would feel like and uber-uber-PC upping that simulation even more, but instead, it’s like someone pulling you away from that PC and turning you to a real human. All the detail possible is there, but it’s not this Turbo HDR feel - it’s just there - natural, and easy. Any remnants of rough edges are gone. There are small moments when I miss it - perhaps an electric guitar biting into a track, or a synth hitting hard - but at the same time, it’s suddenly clear to me that those were artifacts caused by the lesser DAC rather than being “correct” representations of what those sounds were supposed to be.
The next thing I noticed is how relaxing music sounds with the DAVE. Because music flows so much more “naturally”, perhaps due to DAVE’s rather large internal upsampling, there is just this ease to everything. If you want to make other very good DACs sound fatiguing (which I didn’t find to be so in the past), listen to a DAVE.
Finally, and most surprisingly, I found that DAVE has crossed some magical threshold where bad recordings or mastering are no longer as annoying as they were with Mojo, and especially Hugo 2. You can still tell they’re bad - much more so - but because of DAVE’s voicing, it just doesn’t bother me anymore. There are recordings I love as songs that I had started to listen to less just because the sound quality was ‘meh’. It somehow doesn’t bug me as much anymore, and I can enjoy them again. I don’t know how DAVE manages being the most detailed DAC I’ve ever heard, but simultaneously be more forgiving, but there it is.
My final note is that the DAVE’s amp is an absolute dream all by itself, and DAVE also plays VERY nice with my Woo WA5-LE tube amp. With tubes, there’s just this additional magic that makes for an incredibly involving (though, not necessarily technically “better”) listen.
Here’s to Rob Watts and his DAVE! 