Holland's finest DAC maker Metrum Acoustics has produced a range topping new digital to analogue converter called Pavane. This incorporates a proprietary converter chip and casework that’s designed to keep the electronics free from vibration. The Pavane has a double damped inner frame and heavy aluminum front and side panels that are intended to make the DAC “all but immune” to outside vibrations. The top panel consists of a sandwich of steel and 4mm tempered glass. Additionally, the Pavane is supplied with a “sharply designed” aluminum remote control and comes with AES/EBU and USB inputs alongside balanced output.
The DAC-chips were developed in-house to “maximize the potential for musical enjoyment”. They have parallel driven R2R ladder networks to handle very high sample rates and “extremely swift” current to voltage converters are used “in order to protect the integrity of the signal”. The DAC has an FPGA-driven "forward correction module” that splits up the audio samples for each channel into new separate data streams. Each DAC cluster processes a portion of the data in the most linear region of the DAC chips. The result of this process is said to be “extremely high linearity, right down to -140 dB, which gives the Pavane a realistic 24 bit dynamic range”. Dual mono design over the entire frequency range is claimed to achieve 120 dB separation. The Pavane will retail for €4,095 (ex. VAT), however, to celebrate this DAC and Metrum Acoustics 25th anniversary it will be introduced at a discounted price of €3,695 (ex. VAT) until the 31st of January, 2015. www.metrum-acoustics.nl
René has been promised the first review sample so watch this space for a full review of the Metrum Pavane.
Jason Kennedy