DIGITAL SOURCE COMPONENTS

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go to: Contents | Feature | On The Horizon | DACs | CD Players | Music Servers | Integrated Amps with DACs | Portable | Our Top Picks EQUIPMENT review - Berkeley Audio Design Alpha DAC Reference Series chamber to reduce noise coupling. We have very tight RF shielding, and the top panel is machined to within a couple thousandths of an inch so that it forms a tight shield around the components inside. Everything about the design provides a quiet and stable environment for the DAC. RH: Tell me about the hand-calibration process. If we tried to rush any aspect of the manufacturing or alignment process it would be just like putting a junk part in the device. Every aspect has to be done with full integrity or it’s a wasted effort. We can build only two Alpha References per day. RH: That’s pretty limited production capability. tIdAL – The first music service that combines the best High Fidelity sound quality, High Definition music videos and expertly Curated Editorial. MR [Laughs] It’s really not the best kind of product to make if you want to make millions of them and go to the bank. But once again, this is a hyper-precise device and the manufacturing process takes a couple of weeks. After testing we burn in each unit for seven days, 24 hours a day, with a digital input signal and loads on the analog outputs. Then it’s taken to another location where it’s tested and thermally stabilized for another day. Then we do the final alignment process which involves both measurement and listening. I didn’t mention it before, but the digital filter is our own propriety design with very precise performance parameters. To preserve that performance we model the analog output filter as a precision cascaded part of the overall digital/analog filter system. It’s the analog filter that we handadjust to the tolerances we require—1/100th of 1 percent. To be able to make adjustments with that precision we use the very best trimmers available with precious-metal wipers and operate them over a very limited range. These devices are not normally used commercially— they’re mil-spec. But for precision, stability, and repeatability, we had to use them. It’s an iterative process of measuring and listening that takes three hours per unit. MR It is pretty limited production. If the whole world falls in love with this product, we could increase production with a parallel production path, but this is not trivial because of the final alignment. We have a brilliant, degreed engineer with well over $100,000 worth of test equipment and about $100,000 worth of playback components performing the alignment. If we wanted to have another final alignment station operating in parallel, we couldn’t just hire somebody and have them align it by measurement. The important thing is that it has to be right. We don’t ship it until it’s fully optimized. From an integrity point of view, we’re giving the customer the performance he’s paying for. And it’s also self-interest; our success is based on our audio quality and we’re not going to do anything to jeopardize that. sounds. perfect. 48 Buyer's Guide to Digital Source Components 2014 available on all systems www.theabsolutesound.com tidalhifi.com previous page NEXT page
go to: Contents | Feature | On The Horizon | DACs | CD Players | Music Servers | Integrated Amps with DACs | Portable | Our Top Picks Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter The Vitruvian DAC Scot Hull I first met Light Harmonic’s chief designer Larry Ho in Atlanta at the AXPONA show, back in 2011. Of all the nifty bits I ran across that day, a few stood out, but the most striking was clearly his Darth Vader DAC. Maybe it didn’t really look like Darth Vader. Maybe it just evoked the Dark Lord of the Sith. But you take my point—it was a striking design. He laughed at me when I mentioned Lord Vader, and quickly pointed out why his brandnew DAC, which he was calling Da Vinci and not Darth Vader (for copyright reasons probably), had that angular chic: I was looking at two distinct chassis, stacked in such a way that they could save space, eliminate the extra circuitry and external cabling that a separate chassis required, and still reap all the benefits that physical separation grants. All I heard was “it rotates,” and I think I spent far too many minutes slowly pivoting the chassis top, which houses all the delicate conversion circuitry, back and forth over the power supply that sits in the lower box. You’ll forgive me (and hopefully Larry will too) when I tell you that you really ought to try this out at the next audio show. It’s a remarkable bit of machining, and the slip-snick as the top rotates is a bit akin to fondling the bezel of a Rolex. Slip-snick. Slip-snick. Slip-snick…I think I might have hypnotized myself a little bit there. Anyway, the Da Vinci definitely made an impression but it would be another two years before I got the chance to get up-close and personal. Just so you know, the Da Vinci will play all of the standard, run-of-the-mill lossy and lossless computer audio files like WAV, FLAC, and AIFF at all the standard sampling rates, including 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.4kHz, and 192kHz, across all inputs, which include a single USB-B interface, as well as AES/EBU and SPDIF. In a bit of foreshadowing, it’s the USB input that gets a bit of a bonus— the sampling there can also accept 352.8kHz and 384kHz files. And that, my friends, is pretty cool. At $20,000, the Da Vinci sits at the bottom of the ladder of Light Harmonic’s scale. Sort of (we’ll get back to that). One level up sits the DaVinci Dual DAC, an externallyidentical box that adds the ability to decode DSD and double-DSD files along a completely separated and isolated path, which is the only way that the Light Harmonic team felt that DSD could be implemented without seriously compromising the sound. Two DACs, two paths, one chassis, $31,000. And at the very top of the heap The just-announced Sire DAC, at $120,000, will compete with the very best on offer, and represents Light Harmonic’s fullout, no-holds-barred assault on the high end. An intimidating ladder, I’ll admit it. But for those of you prone to skipping ahead, let me completely spoil the surprise. The Da Vinci DAC is the best all-around performer I’ve yet heard. It isn’t inexpensive and its looks will raise eyebrows, but the sound it’s capable of weaving is the most comprehensively compelling I’ve yet heard out of my home system. Full stop. Done. Listening to Da Vinci So, let’s be different and start squarely in the middle, with this: What do you listen for when auditioning a DAC Me, I tend to look for a couple of things. Maybe not first on the list, but somewhere near might be whether there’s a sense of depth. A lack here covers a variety of sins—clarity and detail, for examples. When I’m truly happy with 49 Buyer's Guide to Digital Source Components 2014 www.theabsolutesound.com previous page NEXT page
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