To be released in January... Monolith headphone amplifier and DAC with Dirac Sensaround II

[Flak]

To be released (hopefully) in January 2018:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=120&cp_id=12008&cs_id=1200801&p_id=24459&AID=11051853&PID=3821802

About Dirac Sensaround:

https://www.dirac.com/sensaround/

Flavio

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Sounds like it might accomplish close to the same thing the Smyth Research Realizer A16... for a lot less.

 

[Flak]

Smyth Realiser is a product that we know and it's a pretty cool product.
It performs a measurement in a particular room and for a particular person so that you get a virtual experience of that particular hifi room.
One of the reasons why we ventured into this is that we have found that the need for individualization is less important than generally thought, provided that the HRTFs are modelled correctly... just as in room correction, trying to model every tiny detail of a head-related transfer function can lead to errors.
The solution needs to be robust to work for everyone.
Also we have not tried to make a system that takes a given HiFi room and transforms that into headphones.
We rather wanted to create an ideal listening space... real rooms and hifi systems have lots of problems that color the sound, which is exactly what we wanted to avoid.
In a sense the virtual HiFi room could be the ultimate room correction solution!

Flavio

 

[Sonnie Parker]

This might be a much wiser solution for me than what the Realizer would be. I was looking at purchasing it for nothing more than getting a real two-channel experience out in front of me with headphones when I am not able to actually go to my listening room. It sounds like the Monolith might accomplish this. Can you confirm Flavio?

 

[Flak]

This might be a much wiser solution for me than what the Realizer would be. I was looking at purchasing it for nothing more than getting a real two-channel experience out in front of me with headphones when I am not able to actually go to my listening room. It sounds like the Monolith might accomplish this. Can you confirm Flavio?

Well... the best way to know is getting a testing unit when available

 

[Todd Anderson]

I believe I listened to this at CEDIA... looked like a well built unit. Sounded great.

Nice to see Dirac pairing up with Monoprice!

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Well... the best way to know is getting a testing unit when available

Agree...

 

[tesseract]

Whoa, this is an exciting piece of gear!

 

[Matthew J Poes]

I actually think the coolest piece of technology in this is the amplifier topology. The THX AAA technology is an amplifier topology THX developed allowing the absolute lowest distortion currently possible in any amplifier. There are, to my knowledge, no other amplifiers as technically perfect as this. The only other amplifier I’m aware of that is as low distortion and clean as this, that also uses the THX AAA topology is Benchmark Audios AHB2. An amplifier that has received great reviews and has the lowest measured distortion and noise of anything measured by stereophile. I’m fact the amplifier is so clean that it revealed non-linearity introduced by the speaker cable and test load used by John Atkinson. I think you have to appreciate when something has become so clean that a cable is now introducing more distortion than the amplifier itself is.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/benchmark-media-systems-ahb2-power-amplifier-measurements

I can’t wait to see how this little amplifier measures. If it’s even in the neighborhood of of the benchmark amplifier it will provide the first ever headphone amplifier that is actually technically capable of reproducing the full technical capability of an actual 24bit file.

 

[Flak]

It took almost one year more than expected but the portable unit is available now:
https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_...seq=1&format=2
and the desktop version in December.
Here the first indipendent user comment:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/mono...#post-14589373

Flavio

 

[tesseract]

I have been itching for a headphone amp, glad I waited to pull the trigger because I am a huge fan of Dirac Live.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

This is great news. Can’t wait to check them out. The technology in these devices is top notch.

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Awesome!

 

[Jack]

Cool Beans. I have several headphone amps ranging from class solid state and digital models to a nice Schitt tube model. This one mentioned herein looks to be very special.

 

[Flak]

Dirac Sensaround® is not an "effect" so do'nt expect pyrotechnic effects...
this is the logic behind it:
https://www.dirac.com/dirac-blog/how-to-make-headphones-stereo-compatible

Flavio