Coming Soon on the bench: Hestia and Hyperion

[JonMarsh]

I have have been itching to put the Hyperion on the bench, but I figured the way it's sort of pushed as a set with it's "matching" preamp I ought to get one of those to test, too. Specs are almost too good to believe, especially at the price. But that's almost become the norm for Denafrips.






So a silver sample of the Hestia was ordered early this week, quoted ship time is 5 days.






This are smaller than they look; keep in mind the amp is just 80W per ch at 8 ohms. But with fully balanced operation and THD+N < 0.001, I have "Great Expectations" as Dickens would say...

[Alaric]

They look very nice. While ugly isn't a deal breaker, beautiful gear certainly adds to the ownership experience. That, and I'm almost certain that good looking gear sounds better, at least when I'm looking at it.

[JonMarsh]

Denifrips does have above average industrial design; but what really caught my eye was the interior design- much of that comes down to things that are actually electrical design choices (like using many multiples of small caps (because the net ESR and ESL are lower and the self resonant frequency much higher)- this continues with the new products.





Terminator mainboard

[technodanvan]

Those are real pretty Jon. Judging from the pictures, someone had a little OCD on this one. With the exception of maybe 3-4 caps in the middle, they look perfectly vertical.

[JonMarsh]

I did pop the cover off the Terminator I got shipped last year, and it looks good- very good.

I do love the way it sounds- so far, one of the few units in the same ballpark roughly as my TotalDAC, and the only one under $10K you can say that about.

[JonMarsh]

Some good news!

Mike Powell, the US service center and order taker for Denafrips, called me Tuesday night from NY to double check the chassis color I wanted (silver or black) and let me know that my unit should be shipping on Thursday, presuming all goes according to schedule.

Apparently the demand has caught the off guard compared with even their most hopeful estimates, so shipping times have slipped from 5 days to 15 to 30 days.

Ah well... I suppose a 30 day wait and $1100 is a pretty reasonable price to pay for what is otherwise an excellent $5K preamp, based on perofrmance, features, and build quality.


OTOH, with regards to that "performance" aspect, I subscribe to the aphorism of "In God We Trust, All others we verify..."


Stay tuned. I will be testing a full Denfrips stack (Terminator + Hestia + Hyperion), on the bench, and in the listening room.

What might seem wacky is that the DAC costs more than the preamp and power amp combined; but let me just say this is something of a statement (for me) about where the most critical piece of electronics lies- your source component. The rest can't do any better than what you feed them.

[JonMarsh]

Like waiting for Christmas...

Text update from DHL - they will deliver Monday.

This is like waiting for Christmas...

:B

[JonMarsh]

DHL kept their word, delivered yesterday

OF course, without pictures, it's not real on the Internet.







One thing scary about the Hestia preamp- the remote makes my Halcro DM10 remote (*in storage in Idaho) feel cheap in comparison....

• It's heavier, and clearly well made/machined from a solid billet of aluminum....
• It works (the Halcro has been dead for a while and resisted attemps at resuscitation

The preamp isn't all that big, but it weighs so much it almost feels like it's a solid block of aluminum, too.

Scary if you're a conventional competitor- such as Auralic from Taiwan, as the Tarus Preamp might be one of the most similar competitors. See my test results for that unit in this forum. The Taurus Preamp has a bit nicer industrial design, but only has one set of balanced inputs, instead of two like the Hestia- something many reviewers of the Taurus wished for.

Oh, and the Taurus is about 2X the price.

Interesting.

Time to put some hours on this, then put it on the bench and to some listening tests.

[JonMarsh]

Note also that the analog inputs are not arrayed as you might think from a casual glance at the back panel. The Hestia has very high channel separation specs, and that comes because the connectors are laid out with bilateral symmetry; so connecting to both Inputs 1 requires using the far left and far right XLRs...


but the results are quite promising...





The big thingie under the preamp is the DAC! all 50 lb worth!

[tktran]

You’re teasing us John... come on... show us your graphs!!!

[JonMarsh]

I hope to do that soon... remember, my day job is 7 days a week since the middle of April, and this looks likely to continue because of staffing and resource issues through the end of September. I have had a few long discussions with my manager, and quite literally said, "Enough is enough!" Just because you can't solve your problems with your management doesn't mean you can indefinitely push them down to others.

He's in a pickle, as he has three high profile assignments he was given the beginning of the fiscal year, and mine is the only one that hasn't gone off the rails already - the others are unrecoverable.

[JonMarsh]

Plus, that tyrant out on the East Coast, Steve Manning, has me working my fingers to the nubs on test cabinets and crossovers for his first SMJ project!

[JonMarsh]

Two different front panel configurations to test- one with the woofer toward the top. Getting the woofer in an MT system away from floor bounce is important. We'll see if this makes any worthwhile difference. I've got to model it in VituixCAD, too.

BTW, even though I paid for two licensed copies of VituixCAD back when Kimmo was selling it, I still donate to him now- he keeps updating regularly and adding useful features- a first class guy!

:T

[JonMarsh]

Slow work takes time...

Finding time for this testing has been a real challenge... but progress is happening!

Unlike my write up for the DM11, this is not a preamp that will break your back or your bank. However, it does seem to offer very nice money for the price, and the build quality is exceptional at this price point, as the pictures above how.

The factory specs are quite good- so I've been itching for a while to see how well they're realized.




I did let it "idle" on the bench with a middling level signal, about 1V RMS, which is typical for fairly loud playback with "normal" input range power amps (1.5 to 2.0VRMS for rated output)(I say normal, because there is some industry movement to higher input voltages for full output in order to allow preamp S/N ratio to be better optimized.)

Note that this measurement is showing the THD with an A weighted measurement, while all the other measurements have no weighting curve.





In this case, I would say the preamp is already pretty well optimized for the conventional dynamic range requirements, because these are very good numbers for 1VRMS- at this level, the results are usually dependent on signal to noise ratio more than circuit nonlinearity.


Next up is the THD+N at 1kHz sweep, going up to 15VRMS.





Let's look at some distortion versus frequency sweeps.

This is at 600mV RMS, which correlates with some moderately loud listening levels in most systems- probably 3-6 dB below clipping.





This is a level sufficient to push you to the edge of clipping with most typical amplifiers.




Here we're seeing a bit of rise in the high frequency distortion, but it's still under 0.001% at 20kHz.


Unfortunately you're not going to find one of these at your local HiFi emporium; at this point, the only way to buy one in the US is direct from the Singapore world wide distributor, VINSHINE Audio.

https://www.vinshineaudio.com

That's a bit of a leap of faith, I realize- but if you're intrigued by what I've shown you here, you might want to at least head over to six moons audio and check out their review.

https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/denafrips2/

I don't have any of my big guns speakers around right now (stored in Idaho until I retire end of next year) but I like this unit for my current project reviews and just listening to stuff- BTW, it's half rack width, but it weighs as if it was milled out of a solid billet of aluminum.

But aluminum doesn't deliver your music- you might find that at this price point, the Hestia does a very good job of that. Very clear and tonal midrange and top to bottom coherency. It reminds me of some good tube preamps from the days of yesteryear...

[Exocer]

Hey Jon,
This setup looks terrific. While i'm not on the market for a preamp, I am considering solid state amps. Have you gotten around to measuring the amp yet?

Cheers!

[ergo]

Denafrips has a new model of balanced pre next to Hestia now - Athena
I did roll a DIY pre for my Purifi power amps, but if I would still be hanging this would be a candidate for sure....

[JonMarsh]

Wow, life has been complicated lately - you have some idea, but then again, on a personal level, I'm sure most of us have no idea, but our own stories to tell....


Unfortunately my to-do list is as long as my arm, but my time available list seems to be about the size of the palm of my hand... so this is still waiting. It will wait longer, because the AP analyzer is among the pieces going to Idaho this week for off site climate controlled storage.


Just to make things a bit worse, I'm going to follow up on Ergo's post and let you guys do a bit of window shopping- I was just updated by Vinshine Audio on Saturday or Sunday, and they have a slew of interesting new items in the pipeline. This includes the Athena preamp Ergo mentions, the Thallo Power Amp, the Gaia DDC digital format converter, and the Avatar CD transport.

Great Scott, someone has been very busy over there at Denafrips!

Being that I'm one that has to suffer with a lot of deferred gratification, but get by know that there is something in the pipeline, what else could I do but get something put into the pipeline? I prefer to use a networked music audio server with Roon, but haven't had the time to set it up with the new gear here in San Ramon... for music test sources, I've just been using my Tascam 1U CD transport with AES-EBU out into the Denafrips Terminator. Now, Denfrips is preparing to ship a transport based on the Philips CDM4/19 transport (they've stocked up on 3,000 NOS laser mechanisms) and it's hitting all my wish list desires like they have a wire tap into my brain...

• Proprietary FPGA DSP processor
• FIFO buffer and reclock using internal crystal oscillator
• FEMTO Cyrstal Oscillator
• Optical isolation for all digital output interfaces
• External master clock input supported
• Upsampling in the transport supported, to 88.2, 176.4, 352.8 kHz

:banana:


Digital outputs include:

• Coas SPDIF via RCA
• TOSlink
• AES/EBU Balanced XLR
• I2S HDMI LVDS Standard
• I2S RJ45 LVDS Standard
• I2S RJ45 LVCMOS Standard

:thanku:


The significance of the I2S output is that it transfers the clock and the signal on separate Digital lines, and is more robust and lower jitter than either SPDIF or AES/EBU. My Denafrips DAC has I2S inputs, multiple formats. I have a Signature Rendu network interface that outputs I2S. The interesting comparison (in time, that is, eventually) is whether the I2S sounds better than, say, AES/EBU rechecked through the Mutec MC3+ with a Rubidium oscillator master clock.

:huh: