MUSICIAN PEGASUSII True Balanced R2R 6BIT DSD Resistance DAC

With the previous DAC, I was looking for songs that were great to listen to. With the Pegasus II, listening has a completely different quality, a completely different consistency, because every song just sounds great. You can literally feel the energy of the music. You feel the music. Even though it hasn't even completed the warm-up period yet. The music is perfect because it is unagitated and doesn't cause any stress. With piano music, for example, I react very sensitively to a reverberation (ringing), but this is not an issue at all with the Musician Pegasus II, everything sounds wonderfully soft and fast and shows an absolutely real performance with a great atmosphere. When instruments decay softly and quickly, there are pauses and you can hear the background music in the background - yes, that's exactly how it should be. And not like with some DACs, where the music never fades out completely and you don't even notice these pauses.

However, I'm often not sure whether this effect is due to the DACs themselves or whether it has to do with the integrated preamps. I have tried 6 DACs with integrated preamps and they all had this problem. It was only when I connected an external PreAmp that the decay was much better. Delta/Sigma DACs almost mutated into R2R DACs. But only almost, because the treble is still very sharp with Delta/Sigma DACs and the sound sometimes has sharp edges, which sounds much rounder and more pleasant with R2R DACs.

I wonder whether it makes any sense at all to integrate preamps into DACs, because apparently this causes slight interference and not a pure signal. Preamps and especially the power supply must be very well shielded if the signal is to be free of interference. In any case, there was no DAC with an integrated PreAmp that delivered a similarly pure signal as the use of an external PreAmp.

The only thing about the Pegasus II is that I had to search a little for settings for the I2S input, as the standard pin assignment did not match the SD-9 from SMSL, but you can change this with the NOS button (if anyone wants to know). It would be interesting to know what exactly the difference is to the first model of the Pegasus, which parts have actually been changed. But ok, Musician writes that the sound is better, so I'll go with that. In any case, I'm very happy with the Pegasus II.