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EQUIPMENT review - Light Harmonic Da Vinci
ist. It’s a fascinating effect and is especially
clear with the Da Vinci, and another something I
hadn’t noticed before. Again, neat.
Okay, after detail and depth, I tend to look
for bass “authority.” For whatever reason, my
experience with high-res-capable DACs has
been dominated by a sense of litheness in
the presentation. It’s as if the tonal balance
is anchored a bit high. A great deal of listener
attention gets focused on sonic aspects like
“air” and “detail,” which is generally a rather
pleasing effect, but doesn’t necessarily mean
baby’s got back. So, I reached for another track
from Chris Jones’ Roadhouses and Automobiles.
“No Sanctuary Here” enjoyed a year or two as
the Most Overplayed Song At An Audio Show,
due in no small part to the ominousness of the
bass track. It is, in a word, Big. Like, that’sa-thunderstorm-and-we’re-never-going-toreach-shelter-in-time
Big. Played back on big
speakers in a big room it’ll shake the walls and
everything between, which is probably why it
was so popular—it’ll stop show traffic out in
the hallway, for sure. Anyway, I’ve found that
many supposedly full-range loudspeakers don’t
handle the track with equal aplomb, so I like
to use it when Looking For Mr. Big Bass. What
I’m listening for is a deep, satisfying sense of
harmonic rightness, of pitch definition, of…
okay, you know what I really want It’s fear,
plain and simple. If the sound doesn’t make
me dive for the floor screeching “holy crap,”
it isn’t right. It’s also not enough to sketch
that tone, I want speed, precision, and decay,
but perhaps most importantly, I want fullness
and continuity, and they are rare. So, assuming
the speakers can go there, the question is, will
this DAC Thelma-and-Louise me right off the
cliff and into an audio abyss, or will there be
some kind of last second slide just short of
the danger zone The Berkeley Audio Alpha
DAC does this zone particularly well, and quite
frankly, it was the reason I bought it. The Da
Vinci also gets this particular aspect “right,”
but with a slightly different take. Namely,
there’s the sense that there’s nothing to catch
you as you dive off the background into forever.
Thank you, Inky.
Tracking bass speed and PRAT took me to
Jem’s Finally Woken and “Come On Closer.” A
sexy track, this, where the bass line is frontand-center
and climbs and dives throughout
the tune. Another one for testing the limits
of a loudspeaker or setup, it’s a matter of
continuity and roundness to the notes as
they drop like cannonballs onto a suddenly
trampoline-like soundstage. With the backdrop
the Da Vinci knitted out of the void, tracking
the bass was an athletic exercise, arresting
and explosive and altogether addicting.
Reference Recordings has a reputation
for great recordings, and the Minnesota
Orchestra’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s
Symphonic Dances is dynamic and complex
in just the right way to short-sheet a digital
converter. I’ve heard this piece quite a lot
in 24-bit/176kHz high-resolution PCM; it’s
included on the HRx Sampler that’s available
from Reference Recordings that came with
the Berkeley DAC. The piece begins softly; the
temptation will be to crank it up early, which
makes the crescendos even more entertaining,
the sudden climbs so stark and unexpected
that my dog fled in a mixture of terror and
outrage and led to another argument with my
wife over “proper listening levels” and whether
or not I’d be allowed to have the remote
back. Whoops. But the Deep Space Da Vinci’s
backdrop sets a really involving stage and
tensions mounted swiftly as the woodwinds
and strings began to struggle with each other,
battling for supremacy, instead of battling for
audibility. And even with the lightning crash of
cymbals and the thunderbolt of the timpani,
you had depth, placement, and delineation.
This is the most coherent rendition I’ve heard
of this piece, and played back at appropriate
volume (i.e., loud), even a diehard classical
skeptic (that would be me) was thrilled.
Note to self: Play demos when the kids are
in school not when they’re in bed.
There are those who would call the Da Vinci
“very analog.” I’m not sure I’m one of them, as
Great Big Bass on a vinyl system is even more
problematic than it is for a DAC. So, no, the Da
Vinci is not analog-like. It’s better than that.
But, that said, there’s an ease to the sound
that is entirely non-fatiguing. Not to say that
it’s in any way treble-challenged, but tracks do
not tend to go brittle when bad—bad recordings
stay that way, which is to say, Adele’s 21 still
sounds horribly compressed, even with the
Da Vinci’s Duet Engine sorting it out (more
below). But what I mean is that it doesn’t
sound worse. Some DACs, when fed crap, tend
to either smooth out the hard edges or use
them as an excuse to start swinging bags of
broken glass at your ears. The Da Vinci does
neither—compression sounds like what it is,
which is “a horrible tragedy.” Here, vinyl tends
to do better, as whatever travesties usually
visited on a recording destined for silver discs
and/or iTunes tend to not be visited on the
vinyl version.
Again and again, I was tempted and taunted
about the volume—a little voice kept saying,
“Maybe you should turn it up.” My wife loved
that part. Ahem. But the grain-free view on
the music was as transparent as I’ve been able
to achieve at home, and that view was fully
as three-dimensional as the source material
allowed. I can’t be faulted for throwing myself
headfirst into such waters, now can I Volume
restrictions be damned! Ha HA!
Tonally, I found the Da Vinci to have a
balanced presentation as no particular part
of the sonic tapestry stands out. The bass is
exemplary, and there is no tonal shift upward
or downward that would mark the designer
as overly celebrating some favored portion
of the audio band. On the whole, the DAC’s
presentation is unremarkably excellent and
nothing feels out of place; it’s all of a piece.
Organic. Which makes isolating its signature
something of a nightmare, but there it is.
I’d say that it was, in a word, musical, but I’m
pretty sure that’s another one of those damned
clichés, so let’s just settle on “awesome.”
Technical Bits
This DAC is almost annoyingly stuffed full of
audio wizardry, but one thing you won’t find is
any digital upsampling or oversampling. Why
not Well, it’s simple: Light Harmonic couldn’t
get that kind of design to come close enough
to the sound of an analog front end. Bitperfect
protection and preservation led the
company to a shunt-regulated resistor-ladder
51 Buyer's Guide to Digital Source Components 2014 www.theabsolutesound.com
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