Yamaha DP-U50 Mini-Review

My review of the Yamaha DP-U50 USB soundcard.

What is it?

The Yamaha DP-U50 is kind of a weird animal that I don't think Yamaha ever figured out how to market. But it's an interesting toy for computer audio people so I thought I'd give it a mini-review.

Yes, but what is it? Well, it's a lot of things, including:

An outboard DAC which takes USB, optical, or coaxial input up to 24/96
An outboard ADC which outputs to USB or optical
A digital/analog preamp
An outboard audio DSP, including Dolby Digital/DTS downmixer
A headphone amplifier

So, in point of fact, a lot of what it is is simply an external or USB sound card. That's mostly accurate, but I think that leaves out the preamp and downmixing functions (though I guess some soundcards do downmixing). It seems like a pretty fair amount of stuff to pack into one box. Yamaha calls it a CAVIT for "convergence of audio/video and information technology" (possibly one of the worst acronyms ever) and the box calls it a "personal sound processor." Again, I don't think Yamaha's marketing department is doing them any favors here.

Another thing that's critical to note is that right now Yamaha is selling this online for $125 plus shipping (which was like $22). So, this package comes in at less than $150 all told.

How I'm using it

It's in my study as part of my computer setup, see pics one and two (that's it just to the left of the NAD receiver). What you can't see in those pictures is a small TV to the left of the computer monitors which is fed from a digital cable box.

I have it connected to my computer both via USB and via digital optical. Why two connections? Because I can route iTunes output strictly to the USB port via a cool piece of software called Detour. The optical connection only gets used when I watch DVDs on the computer--which I admit is quite rare--and for some reason on the Mac I can't get Apple's DVD player to send real 5.1 DD or DTS over USB. I'll admit I haven't tried very hard, though.

Anyway, the cable box optical out also goes to the DP-U50, and I have an analog input to the DP-U50 from one of the tape outs on my receiver.

So, the upshot: I use it for computer music audio playback via USB, I use it for recording old audio tapes to the computer via the ADC functionality, and I use it as the audio DAC when watching TV. This last one is important since it will downmix the 5.1 audio signal offered by some movie channels down to 2 channels. That's important for headphone listening, and for me in general since I don't have 5.1 in my study.

How it performs

Since it does a lot of different things, it's important to consider each one of those separately.

As an audio DAC

This is the primary purpose for which I bought it, as a USB DAC. So, how's it sound? It's surprisingly good given the price. To my ears, it definitely sounds better than my M-Audio Sonica, which is a pretty common USB sound solution--more balanced overall (less bright) and detailed, clearer bass. I'd say performance (this is on uncompressed redbook) is pretty comparable to my Sony MXD-D5C, which is a CD/MD changer from a couple years ago. So, while it's not about to unseat expensive CDPs, it's comparable to at least moderately decent ones. Obviously, don't sell your Benchmark DAC1 as this won't replace it, but it isn't bad--especially at this price point!

I suspect the reason that it's a decent DAC is that it sits completely outside the (noisy) computer enclosure and has its own dedicated power supply. This may be why it has an edge over the Sonica. The chipset used is the same chipset that Yamaha put in its home theater receivers before the advent of 6.1 and 7.1 formats, so if you're familiar with the DAC in a Yamaha home theater receiver, well, it's that.

It radically outperforms the DAC in the digital cable box (a Motorola DCT 2500), but I think that's as much a comment about the cable box as it is the DP-U50.

As an ADC

Since I'm on a Mac, I can't run Yamaha's custom software for it, so I don't have a lot of control of recording settings, but that's OK for my purposes: it records in the traditional 16 bit / 44.1 kHz format. As I mentioned, I'm mostly archiving old audio casette tapes and the DP-U50 is very up to this task; there are probably better ADC solutions out there but they'd be overkill for this purpose anyway.

As a headphone amp

It's not especially good here. It has a lot of juice and it can drive my 300-ohm PXC 250s (with noise cancellation off) just fine in terms of volume. However, it doesn't sound all that great. It's definitely not in the same league as my PIMETA or my Headsave Classic; I'd say it's a notch below my Xin SuperMicro. It has a higher noise floor than I'd like, it's kind of sloppy in general, and has little soundstage. On the other hand, I have a set of Klipsch Promedia speakers on my desk at work, and it beats the headphone out on those by a good stretch. It might be adequate as a work rig if you don't listen too hard at work.

As a preamp

Well, certainly not as good as a real dedicated audiophile preamp, but it is very useful to me as a digital preamp (or, more accurately, a digital source selector). It's not awful as a regular analog preamp, but nothing special to recommend there, either.

As a DSP unit

Frankly, I abhor all of the stupid DSP modes found in home theater equipment ("concert hall" and "cathedral" and such). They all sound awful to me, both with the DP-U50 and everywhere else I've ever heard them. So I have no opinion on whether it does this well or does it poorly.

However, there is one spot that I will comment on, which is the downmixing from DD/DTS 5.1 to 2-channel. It does this surprisingly well. I've heard various processors do this generally with pretty sketchy results, and the DP-U50 does a much more solid job than I would have expected. Dialog is neither over-emphasized or completely lost, which are the normal sins committed here. A pleasant surprise, actually.

Gotchas

Other than as a headamp, I obviously generally like this beastie, but in all fairness, there are some gotchas. First, it's huge. Look at those pictures again; it ain't all that much smaller than my receiver! It's also fairly heavy, but I think that's mostly the power supply and heavy power supplies are almost always OK in my book.

The lack of Mac software support is slightly annoying, but I think the only functionality I'm missing as a result is the equalizer. If I understand it correctly, all the equalization is done in the digital domain, not the analog one, so I suspect that if you like digital equalizers, then you might want this functionality. Not a big deal for me.

There is another potential issue here in that the optical digital output might not be bit-perfect. I've tried capturing the optical out of my CDP through the DP-U50 and comparing that to just capturing the optical out of the CDP directly, and they don't appear to be precisely identical but I'm not 100% sure that isn't some kind of software issue. If anyone knows an automated way to compare two AIFF files that have different onsets, I'd love to know about it.

Conclusions

The Yamaha DP-U50 is a nice toy, kind of digital audio swiss army knife. It can do a lot of things and does most of them competently, and the price is most definitely attractive. While it's not going to immediately win over people used to outboard DACs or CDPs at 5x the price, it's a decent DAC which does a lot of other things--heck, it even comes with a remote--in a single if somewhat large package.