The BEST SOUNDING DAC I've heard: Mola Mola Tambaqui

[Music] hey guys my name is steve guttenberg and i am the audiophiliac and today what what i have in mind for today is a trip a trip to the outer limits of sound quality of digital sound quality and my quote spaceship for the trip is the mola mola tembaki i think it might be i'm pretty sure it is the best sounding dac the best sounding digital converter i have ever heard in this room i want to put the tambaki's accomplishment in some sort of context here right so i'm going to tell you briefly what i've had in this room and this is by no means a complete list but i started with a meridian dac and then i had a theta actually a few theta dax pass through here then i had a wadea and a couple of ideas pass through here and then a sim audio and then an air and then missing something but anyway then i had dennis reps here for quite some time it's my current reference deck and now the timbaki so i've heard i've heard the good stuff but there's something really really special about the sound of the stack now this review today's review kind of was set in motion back in may when i reviewed the mola mola cooler integrated amplifier and that amp had the optional dac stage which is basically the same thing as the tembaki so i had a taste i had a taste of what the timbaki would sound like even before the timbaki was here so when i sent back the kula kula to the distributor gtt audio i requested hey could you guys send me the tembaki i love the cooler cooler but i'm more interested in the dac so they said sure so they sent me the dac and now i've been listening to it for well since june and you know this is the best way to review something where you're not thinking about creating the review or writing the review it's just there and you're living with this piece over time and you just accept it as the norm anyway i'm going to get into the whole methodology later but yeah it made a very strong impression now as to why it sounds different and better you know i have to admit that i'm not the best guy to explain technically why the malamola sounds the way it does or that it sounds different and or better than other decks except to say that most dax including high-end ones a lot of them have off-the-shelf dac chip sets that's not true for the mola mola and there's a lot of high-end decks that use resistor ladder dacs discrete resistor ladder attacks and that's not true for the malamala either now the the molemola deck the digital conversion part of the dac was designed by bruno patsy and he is the man he is the number crunching digital conversion guy everyone says he is i never met him i've heard interviews with him and stuff the guy seems like he's he's definitely up on this but he created a dsp program that does the digital to analog conversion and that is completely unique to mola molar products and i'd say that's why that's pretty much all i got so as for the object itself the temp baking as a piece of gear well first of all it's nice and compact you know unlike a lot of high-end stuff that has to advertise its its power by being big now this is a less than half width components i'm pretty sure less than half width but it feels incredibly inert if you wrap your knuckles on the top of that wavy aluminum top you hear no resonance whatsoever it's just a solid solid piece of cabinetry the front is super simple it's got four tiny little tiny silver buttons and those four buttons select up to four inputs you can use the tambaki without an app or without a remote just with those four selector buttons but yeah you can access more of what makes it good by using the malabola app here it is on the screen it's super simple it's not a lot of options unless you go into the menu and even then there's not that much to it so even if you're not an app kind of guy i wouldn't be afraid of using this app i'm going to put up the complete specs right now for you people that are into the numbers and specs now of course as i've led up to this is well it is expensive the price is thirteen thousand four hundred dollars the inputs and outputs uh even though space is a bit cramped back there are pretty complete but let's just go through it first of all there's an ethernet input so you can use mulamola as an endpoint as a rune endpoint if that's your thing but there's also of course aes ebu meaning the balanced input there's a usb input there's coax input there's an optical input and my favorite input is the i squared s which is how i connected the js audio cdt mark iii transport the cd transport as for the outputs well the outputs are actually kind of limited although there are two headphone jacks a standard 6.3 millimeter one and also a four pin xlr analog output for headphones as with the main outputs well there was only room for the xlr the balanced outputs there's no rca outputs but they include a set of very high quality xlr to rca adapters so i listen to tambaki with both alternatively right i listen to through the rca adapters and also with the balanced output i slightly prefer the balanced output but in either case they both sound amazing by the way it does run warm to the touch but again you might want to keep touching it because it feels so good no knob feel on this one but in terms of just the build quality is so impressive it is handcrafted if i didn't mention it in the netherlands regarding the headphone output i used the tempaki with three really solid headphones the sony mdr z1r which is their flagship model as far as i know and also the abyss diana great headphone and also my old but ever faithful audizy lcd xc which is the closed back version if you're a casual headphone listener is just going to listen you know we have to listen late at night or something like that it's more than adequate but if you're a heavy headphone person you'd probably want to use a headphone amplifier with the tambaki as i said in the intro it sounds different than other dacs and i mean different not just different but better in the sense that it doesn't sound digital and how do i mean that well it doesn't have that kind of pronounced edge that a little tipped up maybe a little pushed sound that digital does that's like beyond realistic levels of detail maybe that's where the way i should say it yeah it's a little more laid back than that but it is not laid back this is a very very very high resolution device and when i say high resolution i'm not meaning like in your face detail i'm talking about this open big enveloping sound that nothing feels pushed yeah that's how to say it it doesn't feel pushed it just is which is kind of like the way music sounds in real life real life music does not you know when you hear acoustic music it's not being amplified it doesn't have that kind of aggressive detail to it no not at all but when we're listening to recordings well remember that pretty much all recordings are made with close mic placement so the mics are unlike what we hear in real life where your ear isn't directly above a violin or a piano well in recordings the mic the listening device is within close proximity of the instruments so in that sense recordings can never sound like you're really there but i think with ten becky it does get me some of that balance of lots and lots of detail lots and lots of room sound and space but never with a push to it so i also did a quickie comparison and it only needed to be quick with the denifrep's terminator and you know what and i was using the the band can their album called future days it's german progressive rock from 1973 and man talk about space and a big open sound they totally nailed it it's incredible it's weird to think they called it future days 49 years ago and it sounds like better actually better than most contemporary recordings and it is rock with textures and layers and dynamics all kinds of stuff going on in there it's very very dense and the terminator was doing a really good job but switching over to the tembaki just turned it just layers opened up veils were lifted all that kind of stuff it just sounded so much clearer over the temp backing one day i was looking around on kobas and i found this recording by tron calivac i can't begin to pronounce the name of the album but it's it's up on the screen now and it is it is one of those yikes it sounds like eno it sounds like you know it sounds like riku or even sounds like george harrison or daniel lenoir because it's electric guitar and violin it's all instrumental but it's so beautiful you know saw as a as a musical instrument glasses you know somebody's finger on a glass making it resonate it's so atmospheric and so deep but it's go it goes in a million different places you know it could be even classified as electronic music because there was since in it and stuff but the predominant sound is of that beautiful slide guitar oh it's it's amazing recording really good sounding matter of fact i bought the cd because i was streaming it off kobas and the cd sounds even better in this kind of tactile reach out and touch the instruments kind of sound but also big space bigger on the cd than it is streaming from kobas another piece of music that i just hit me really really hard was this nick bartis album it's called continuum and the track i'll be very specific about the track it's called module four and it has its jazz but this track has this incredible rock style drumming not fast or splashy just as powerful just feel it in your gut groove that the drums are pounding out and there's electric guitars there's other things happening but it's just the groove on this album that was so intense really really intense it was one of those i had to play it loud you know i do these things the loud part in the afternoon when my neighbors aren't around and i was playing it like 90 95 db peaks and the groove was intense so powerful sounding and that again i was hearing those leading edges on the drums and the symbols were so clear so pure so precise and the low end by the way coming off the tempaki is if anything it feels a little light but it isn't really at its light it's just that it's so tight and fast and quick and taut it can come across as being a little too thin i don't think it's thin i think it's just telling you what's really in the recording it seems that way to me so okay now we're going to do the so steve what did you really think section of the review well it actually comes no surprise to anybody out there this is freaking amazing this is the best deck i've ever had here because it just connects the dots it's just more like the the visceral response of music the leading edge the rhythm and pace this live quality that it delivers is is addicting it truly truly is are there any downsides well the price yeah thirteen thousand four hundred dollars that might be a significant roadblock for many of you but in terms of advancing the state of the art yeah i think so i really do now i'm not the first to do a review of the tambaki there's been others it's just it's just the way the sequence works sometimes but yes so bruno putzi is uh some kind of number crunching genius that he figured how to do this he didn't have to tweak somebody else's deck he just he just did it on his own awesome awesome awesome it's being awesome it is now time for the audiophiliac viewer system of the day so here we go greg sent this in he lives in delaware he has two systems in one for the two part of the system greg is running a dyneeco pass two preamp and a vta st 120 power amp kit that amp is driving those sweet-looking all-tech bolero 890c speakers the solid-state system sports a luxman c-1010 preamp and a luxman m-1500 power ramp feeding jbl l200 speakers greg says the sound is clean and the bass from those 15-inch woofers is super detailed each system has its own moddy 3 dac turntable is a restored thorin's td-124 with an ortofon rmg 212 tone arm and a hannah eh moving coil cartridge the realtor reel is a tiac 4010 4010s cables are by harmonic technology kimber and audioquest double wow triple wow that is amazing greg thanks for sending it in okay we're back my name is steve guttenberg and i am the audiophiliac yeah if you like this review and you must have because you've gotten this far into the show please consider subscribing to the channel join the five thousand 195.000 subscribers are already here and if you have already subscribed thank you so much for doing so and then of course i could bring up the subject of the patreon which can be found at p a t r e o n dot com slash audiophiliac and there is definitely a link to that in the description and after that i can pretty much say yeah my work here is at last complete thank you again for watching and i really really do hope to see you back here again very very soon bye-bye

Channel: Steve Guttenberg Audiophiliac

Views: 23,939

Rating: 4.8851252 out of 5

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Id: 5uY5oiGU1zI

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021