MPD – from Micromega MyDac to Teac UD-501 DSD

/* EDIT Jan 03, 2016 */
Moved to UD-503
/* /EDIT */

Some weeks ago, i tuned my office setup with a micromega MyZic (headphone amp) for my AKG K701.
I looked for a new dac… and decided not to buy a new MyDac but to move my home MyDac to it (great combo – bitperfect at work).

The problem was i needed a new dac…
So i bought the promising new Teac UD-501 (DSD – Direct Stream Digital).

After one week of “burn in” and testing, i’m quite impressed.
I’m not an audio reviewer, more an audio enthusiast.
The Teac is far from the price range (x3) of the MyDac and i couldn’t say the difference with flac 192 (the max managed) is huge… but there’s some. A bit more transparent and lower bass are huge and well defined.
It’s a nice upgrade.
On my personal scale, i put back the MyDac as the best dac under $800 😉

The PCM filter (slow or sharp) makes really small changes. Nearly useless, i leave it off.
Activating internal upsample adds a bit more space on small resolution flac.
There’s no change between the rca and xlr outputs.

But the Teac is more: more resolution, more formats.

From my tuned bit perfect Mele and linux, the usb interface works out of the box.

Hardware:
– Mele a2000 – 512Mo
– Teac UD-501
– nuforce P8-S
– dBTechnologies ASX-18
– 2x RCF ayra 10 sub
– 2x Klein-Hummel O300d

Software:
– My ubuntu armhf
– MPD 0.17.4

I have only tested the usb interface.

Working perfectly:
– Flac PCM up to 24/192kHz
– DSD 64 2.8224Mbit/s

Not completely working:
– DXD up to 24/352.8kHz (wav) and DSD 128 5.6448Mbit/s – i get a really small sync glitch every minute. Perhaps a mpd problem? a mele usb problem? It doesn’t seem to be related to the SoC Allwinner A10, load is always low.

Not working:
– The teac hardware mixer. I can access to it but it’s not working. Perhaps it’s only changing with the headphone output… i didn’t check it.
– The software mixer with DSD. MPD is not managing it. You need to disable the mixer_type to play with dsd_usb. It will work with pcm also but you will lose the volume control from mpd.

I have two mpd output possible config from now.

The MPD with volume control and without DSD:

audio_output {
	type		"alsa"
	device		"hw:2,0"
	name		"UD501"
	auto_resample 	"no"
	auto_channels	"no"
	auto_format	"no"
	use_mmap	"yes"
	mixer_type	"software"
}

The MPD without volume control and with DSD:

audio_output {
	type		"alsa"
	device		"hw:2,0"
	name		"UD501"
	auto_resample 	"no"
	auto_channels	"no"
	auto_format	"no"
	use_mmap	"yes"
	dsd_usb		"yes"
	mixer_type	"disabled"
}

The asound.conf:

pcm.!default { type hw card UD501 }
ctl.!default { type hw card UD501 }

To sum up:

The Teac UD-501 rocks. You can get nearly all from it without any work.
It’s transparent, detailled and handling the future: DSD.
Long life to the UD-501, the Mele, the A10 and my ears.