Review: FiiO K11 R2R DAC/Headphone Amp Steve Graham wonders if a $230 resistor ladder DAC can improve a $400 streamer Audio Friends I’m storing some audio gear for a friend while he is on an extended winter escape. With permission, I got a chance to listen to his FiiO K11 R2R. Audio friends, just what a reviewer on a strict budget needs. R2R? There’s a bit of a to-do, of late, about R2R ladder DACs. I’m stretching a bit to explain this without oversimplifying it too much. The most common way of turning a digital stream into an analogue voltage (or sometimes a current, which is then changed to a voltage) is to send it to a D to A chip that does some math programmed in at its design. In most cases, high-speed processing (often multiples faster than the sampling rate of the data) is employed to move digitally-generated sampling noise away from the audio band. R2R DACs, often called ladder DACs because of their string of resistor “ladders”, use a method employed before the advent of modern DAC chips. Discrete resistors are activated (turned on and off) by associated electronic switches corresponding to the incoming digital [...]
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