Audiophilepure

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“I enjoyed similar benefits when I played the ‘Triptych (Excerpt)’ from A Company of Voices – Conspirare in Concert [Harmonia Mundi, 16/44.1]. This exuberant and syncopated piece for percussion ensemble and concert choir is not one that is easy for most DAC’s to handle, in part because of the large-scale dynamic swings involved and the perhaps slightly over-modulated choral swells that at times threaten to become ragged and strained. However, with the M Scaler assisting the Hugo TT 2, the timing and timbres of the percussion ensemble instruments improved dramatically, with more incisive transient sounds, rounder tonalities all around, and the all-important qualities of ‘swing’ and dynamic ‘jump’ in evidence. Individual choral lines also became clearer and more intelligible, while the potentially problematic vocal swells sounded better controlled and more expressive, with elements of congestion mostly (though not entirely) cleared up. In addition, the sounds of the concert venue were captured more realistically (I can say this with some conviction because I was present in the hall on one of the evenings when the recording was made) and with appropriate stage width and depth. Once again, the M Scaler/Hugo TT 2 pair made an already good recording sound a whole lot better.”

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Returning to our original conversation, you don’t have to be an aristocrat to have a dCS Bartok of your very own. If you love music, and you want a top-quality digital front end that will offer enough performance to stay put, the Bartok is a winner. The performance that it provides more than justifies the price asked. dCS has put a considerable helping of their top technology in a package that outperforms many far more expensive boutique DACs.”

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“Every manufactured chip has limitations and generally made to a price point and design criteria. The chip cannot be auditioned before production, and although it is logically and mathematically sound, you have to wonder if they’re designed with the utmost sound quality in mind?

At Chord Electronics, things are done a little differently. Rob Watts’ FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) approach allows him to design digital circuits with total control over the hardware. So by designing a DAC using FPGA and discrete analog components, it is possible to have increased flexibility over the rigid performance aspects compared to typical off-the-shelf DAC chips.

Watts’ considered approach to ultimate DAC design is to utilise far more complex calculations than was ever thought to be needed, with unheard of long interpolation filters which he designs using what’s known as a windowed-sinc technique. He calculated that a 1,000,000 tap filter (with the number of taps being the indicator of how complex the FIR filter is) is needed to guarantee 16-bit performance from the interpolation filter, a number that was so inconceivably high that many thought that it would be impossible to build. ”