Getting the Pagoda, Pagoda Balanced and Atlantis DACs in place for evaluation was initially disconcerting. Accustomed to the leavened, organic, natural tone of the painstakingly-configured Havanas, the 24bit mhdts at first seemed by comparison spiky and over-emphasizing of transients. Very clean and articulate, however and spatially generous.
The Pagoda on the other hand comes dressed in a similarly sexy outfit, but with a microscope. The Pagoda will ask more of you as a listener while the Stockholm 2 begs more so that you sit back and enjoy the music. The Stockholm is a more “liquid” sounding DAC, a more “saturated” rendering, if that makes any sense.
Prices range from $699 for the entry level Canary through to the $1320 Pagoda with a balanced version of the Pagoda hitting a not so insignificant $1680. I spoke to Jiun, the head designer at MHDT and he felt the new Orchid DAC would be a good call for me for what I wanted, utilising the legendary Philips TDA1541 16-bit chip output, but ...
MBP > Fiio L12 Toslink > Fiio E17 (first batch) > JH16 Pro (Moon Audio Silver Dragon) iPhone 4s > Fiio 30-pin audio cable > Ray Samuels The Hornet > HD650 iBasso DX90 > Bose SoundSport MBP > Cardas Clear USB > MHDT Pagoda (NOS GE 5670) > Leben CS600 (NOS Sylvania & KT120) > Harbeth M30.1 Speaker at 12:48 PM Post #2 of 40
3: Tube rolling may not change anything as this is new territory for an R2R DAC using tubes for the buffer output stage. .... this may be new territority for FiiO, but MHDT Laboratory has been, for quite some time, offering R2R DACs with tube buffer stages (e.g. Istanbul, Orchid, Pagoda).