This is a review and detailed measurements of the Soncoz SGD1 Audio DAC. It was kindly sent to me by its designer. You can be forgiven for not knowing this brand. It is a new company formed by our member @ Ben1987 who had previously designed the super popular Khadas Tone Board DAC! He has left and designed this much higher tier DAC. The SGD1 costs US $469.99 plus shipping from Amazon.The design is unique for a desktop DAC:The volume control is a rotary encoder. The ring around it indicates volume level. I sort of expected a numerical display to the left of it. You can easily set the input and filter types by how long you push the encoder in, and then rotating it.Lots of inputs and outputs are available:Nice to see Coax output and USB-C jack.I don't see an external antenna but there is Bluetooth and one of the videos indicates Wifi capability!As usual we start with our dashboard measurements:Wow. That is some distortion and noise performance! Highest level distortion product is under -130 dB meaning it is absolutely, positively inaudible. Noise must be low enough to push SINAD up to near 120 dB, placing the SGD1 almost at the top of the charts:From here on, we have to keep our fingers crossed that the rest of the measurements follow the same way. First up is signal to noise ratio which we can already predict to be excellent:And excellent it is.Linearity is nailed as perfect as can be indicating very precise output levels:It just doesn't get flatter than this to 20 bits of resolution.Jitter and noise is as clean as I have seen:32-tone signal simulating "music" shows superbly low intermodulation distortion:I almost don't have the hear to show you the next measurement, but I must:Darn it. Our dreaded ESS DAC chip IMD "hump" is there in full glory. It gets exaggerated ironically with lower noise floor that the SGD1 DAC has. Can't believe ESS has not solve this problem on their own and put it in their datasheets, leaving it to each designer to figure it out one by one.He was also gracious to provide the fix for anyone to use!Finally, here are the filter responses with the names on the front panel:I used the Bric one for my testing.Recently we have discovered a couple of DACs whose performance changes after warm up (sometimes better, sometimes worse). So I thought I test for this before running any of the measurements. Here is distortion+noise as the unit went from cold to 15+ minutes of run time:There is essentially no change so I did not try to warm up the unit anymore. All the measurements were performed after this test/warm up.Given the great design skills of Ben, I expected an exceptional DAC and that is almost what we got. There is great attention paid to keeping noise and interference to a minimum. All of this helps SGD1 beat over 200 DACs in SINAD (distortion plus noise)! Unfortunately, courtesy of design quirks in ESS DAC chip, we have rising intermodulation distortion in mid levels. A year ago this would not have mattered since all implementations suffered the same. But now, some companies have solved this or at least mitigated it to a great extent. I hope Ben takes another look at the circuit design and see if he can make the same fix.Until then,Just not as highly as I could have had without the IMD issue.--------As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.This is the third review I am posting today! If this doesn't get you to empty your wallet and give me all that is there, I don't know what will. ) If are so inclined, please use: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/