Steinberg UR44, bad DAC?

[zssmith]

Hey there. I know this forum is more focused towards hi-fi products and less towards pro-audio products, but I wonder nonetheless if anyone can comment on the converters in the Steinberg UR44. Steinberg is owned by Yamaha, and all the chips inside are Yamaha, so presumably it uses a Yamaha DAC chip, if that helps.

Edit: it seems it uses the Cirrus Logic CS4270 and the Yamaha YC706A0

Basically, I am dissatisfied with the sound quality of this device, and I'm wondering if I can get any corroborating evidence as to why. I hear distortion on the main output, kind of deep in the sound. It is subtle, but there. It's not clipping, but something more subtle. It is worse in this regard than the headphone output of my Macbook Pro, although the high end on the Steinberg is brighter. The line-level output is also louder than the Macbook's at full volume, and this is curious to me. Shouldn't line levels match? I could see a Macbook DAC backing off of 0dB at full volume as some type of preventative measure though.

Part two of my question is: I'm thinking of upgrading to a MOTU interface, which (along with Apogee and others), touts a Sabre32 DAC chip. Steinberg doesn't advertise their DAC chips at all, probably because it's all in-house Yamaha stuff. Is the Sabre32 the "real deal," or just an advertising point that will make little difference?

Sorry if this is outside the scope of this forum, just thought I would give it a shot. Thank you!

 

[zssmith]

Don't know if anyone cares around here, but for posterity, would like to relay my findings about the UR44 from some simple tests. I've determined that any signal that crosses -3dB on any of the outputs of the UR44 will distort, excluding the main output which you can dial down a hair from max to shave off those 3dB, at which point the signal will no longer distort. This is pretty disappointing!

It can be fixed by setting the master output in the dspMixFx software to -3dB for the Main Output, and something like -3.25dB for outputs 1/2 (which are supposed to be a line-level mirror of the main output that bypasses the volume knob, but obviously there are problems there). I've just set it to -6dB to be safe, and hopefully will be able to forget about it.

Never before have I had to reduce the (digital) master volume in software to solve a clipping issue (mind you this applies to DAWs as well as iTunes, whatever), and this will make some purists worry because digital attenuation isn't perfect, but I can live with it for now.

Hope this helps someone in the future who is frustrated with the sound quality of their Steinberg interface.