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To recap, similarly featured ESS-based DACs can want €3'300 or $4'995 if we look at the popular AURALiC Vega or Invicta and Mirus from Resonessence. At €1'799 the Sheva in its flight case halves their ask if also enclosure bling. With a pair of 100-watt monos topping Clones' prior range at €899, Sheva would seem stiff only to existing cloners hoping for a silly-low price. A look under this hood versus that of the amps shows a lot more stuff. Funjoy would seem to have applied his usual formula of cost to sell price. But sheva-ization won't stop there. Our busy bee has more models planned in what's expected to become the next-tier range. More Sheva models. Before we talk sonic turkey, let's pop the hood for some geeking out.
Ensconced in dense foam, Sheva is ready for a parachute drop

Here is a photo from Funjoe's bench to give us some location vibes whilst showing the upper 'clean room' (signal) and lower 'dirty room' (PSU) halves in a quasi mirror image. Due to a delay when he had to reject a chassis shipment from his supplier, he decided to send me his personal and as such fully broken-in unit. What a guy! And in case you wanted to know, each Sheva consumes 32 hours of manual labour to put together. That's very work intensive given the sticker.

To appreciate how upscale hifi always begins and ends with the power supply, let's consider the shevidence. Which, to remind us, is about maximally 4.2-volt outputs, not powering loudspeakers. Now that's a proper power supply. It's very different from the—cough!—basic SMPS Antelope Audio bundled originally with their Zodiac models.



Flipped over the Sheva shows off the motherboard with the dual-mono dual-differential op-amp output stage in the middle and the Amanero USB transceiver model at bottom left.

Here is a closer look at socketed op-amp central...

... followed by the Amanero USB transceiver module...

... some display logic...

... another clock ...

... some voltage references...


... and the Femto master clock with the ESS Sabre DAC chip next to it.
 
After I'd sent Funjoe a safe receipt confirmation, he replied requesting that I not post detailed images of the mother board. He wasn't keen to divulge his supplier. Part of our openly published review policy of course is to publish exactly such photos. I explained that I couldn't make unfair exceptions.


"The main PCB is using the standard ESS9018 circuit like in the data sheet. But of cause I treated the filter stage, master clock, regulator, refined the firmware and spent on the USB implementation. The power supply is our original design." And to clarify a point readers often overlook, Sabre's enabled on-chip volume automatically implies that this DAC converts DSD to PCM just as my AURALiC Vega does. One cannot apply gain adjustments to DirectStream data. It's why mastering edits always happen in the PCM domain. DSD is merely an archival format.


Nonetheless incoming DirectStream data still trigger the readout to display as DSD64 or DSD128 with the option of 50, 60 or 70K filter options. I next ran PureMusic's software upsampler through all currently possible PCM options for the Amanero board. This confirmed that as advertised, the Sheva locks to everything from 44.1kHz to 384kHz whilst offering the usual fast and slow filter options. The display can't be defeated or its brightness adjusted. Prior to successful signal lock, the display's lower right corner reads 'unlocked'. Once lock is achieved, that's replaced with the sample-rate figures as shown. Whilst the Sheva's circuitry is balanced, Funjoy prefers the sound of the RCA outputs.


Or as he put it, "if you really want to hear the sound I was after, use the single-ended outputs". Such preferences of course also depend on whether the next component is truly balanced or not. My Nagra Jazz preamp sports transformer-balanced i/o but the actual signal path between them is single-ended. I'd have to investigate how those facts matched up to the Sheva and its designer's preference.