(ES9038 on Coax & RCA)

One of the things I have learned from doing multiple reviews is not to weight music too heavily. The people who do want to know about the music performance want to hear it across a broad range of different genre. The majority of people will use their hardware to do a lot more than just listening to music and the Play is focused on this fact. The main reason I can see to include a microphone is for the gamers and pod-casters, it allows you to have everything you need included in a plain 5.75” drive bay!

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While listening to some streaming off of Netflix through a Windows 10 PC, I noticed I preferred the Burson Play over the other combo (while using Coax and RCA on the ES9038P). This tells me that depending on what you are using your device/s for, either of my combos could be on top of the other, fidelity wise. Hell if you blindfolded me and started switching DACs, I would be hard-pressed to guess right much over 50%, because they are honestly that close in fidelity, especially through my Diamond 220 bookshelf speakers. There are minute details (yep, that is how you spell minute) that come out with the ES9038P that sometimes get lost in the gain of the Play. This isn’t always true and depending on the situation, I would pick the Play.

When I am checking the differences between my two DAC combos I always turn off the tone controls of the Kenwood C-2 pre-amp so I can hear their voicing through just the flat amp of C-2 (where one of the Burson V6-OPA-D “Vivid” discrete op-amps are). The “Play” has this crispness to the sound, without being edgy and thus not fatiguing on the ears. The bass is also prominent and free of distortion. Usually when dealing with lower quality DACs you have to sacrifice either bass or treble to boost the other. This is not true with the Burson Play DAC/Amp combo, it seems both ends of the spectrum are here equally, as well as the mid-range. The Burson Play just has this lively feel to it that is truly musical in its qualities. One of the things I always try to keep in my mind is how the hardware sounds compared to being in person at a concert.

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When I switch back to the ES9038P combo, the first thing I hear is the mid-range clarity of the speech and when there is nothing being played, the noise floor is seemingly non-existent (Note: through the ES9038P’s XLR outputs, there is no noise floor, period). I have mentioned this fact before that the ES9038P + FUN01 seems to deal with digital noise better than the Play and its XMOS through the use of hardware demanding oversampling and noise filtering. The FUN01 has the ground plane split between the digital and analog sides of the board, something not usually seen on budget to mid-range priced USB digital interfaces. The FUN01 connects the analog and digital sides through digital isolators.

System Critical Note: The FUN01 (clone of Singxer’s SU-1) requires power on both the digital/USB side AND on the analog side (5V power supply with center pin positive). This means you can’t use things like SBooster’s “VBus2” that kills the ground and power pins of the USB cable. The best you can do with a design like this is with something like AudioQuest’s “Jitterbug”. The Jitterbug is said to improve clarity and dynamics, bringing an overall more solid and precise sound. I was testing with and without, I’ve never been able to find any negative changes to the fidelity, so I usually run it. We are also UNable to use the modified USB cable for the Play (with the ground removed) with the FUN01.

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