Looks can be deceptive in audio as in life, the Chord Hugo looks a bit big to be a truly portable DAC but way too small be a serious piece of electronics. Yet it is both at the same time, a battery powered headphone amplifier come converter and a 32-bit/3834kHz and DSD-128 audiophile DAC. We […]
As soon as anyone removes the grey Nextel coated cover of the Aqua (Acoustic Quality) La Scala Mk II DAC he or she will see that they mean serious business in Italy. Where a lot of converters today consist of one or two boards with highly integrated SMD components, Aqua has chosen to use seven […]
The phrase is game changer. This not a CD player as we know it, with the possible exception of the £6,000 Rega Isis nothing I have heard in digital audio delivers resolution and musicality in such convincing and entertaining fashion as the Saturn-R. Ever since streaming came along I have pretty much given up on […]
Quantization Noise Killed The Cat, an odd name for a DAC but this is no ordinary converter. Made in Norway for both the music lover and the hands on audio enthusiast the AB-1.2 is an asynchronous USB DAC in a compact box with a micro USB connector, RCA phono outputs and a light on the […]
Without a clock signal generated somewhere in your CD player, streaming device, D/A converter or digital video player you would not be able to get any sound or picture out of the box. Most clocks are very simple devices that generate a waveform from a quartz oscillator with some simple parts to get the clock […]
The original Metrum Octave was a rather special DAC. It came in two boxes, had minimal features and sounded remarkable, in fact truly superb and competed with products at twice its £729 Price. It had only one shortcoming and that was the absence of a USB input, largely because it was developed before this input […]
In a world changing from CD to download as the primary music source a digital to analogue converter is as easy to buy as a CD player (probably easier, Ed.). In any price range you can think of from less than £50 up to astronomical figures. At the same time a lot of integrated amplifiers […]
In this second part of my review of Ethernet cables (see part 1 here), I am continuing my research into differences between various types of AudioQuest Ethernet cable. This time the most expensive ones are compared to the best of the cheaper types assessed earlier. For this second test I have changed the set-up of […]
Every once and a while someone is kind enough to loan me a McIntosh product, this time it was the Dutch distributor New Transtec that brought a D100 digital preamplifier to play with. I have been in love with McIntosh since the 70’s although I’ve never bought a single piece because it might finish my […]
I have been called a fool many times. In the seventies, when I was among the first to write about differences in speaker cables, and later when I discovered the same kind of sound changes with interconnects. In the nineties power cables became an issue. Now that streaming audio has usurped my CDs the time […]
Although there is a less is more ethos across the high end world few companies imbue their products with the degree of design purity that Primare does. This one suspects is down to their Scandinavian roots, that part of the world is well known for its clean, pared down design, frippery is not in their […]
There are moments when I don’t quite understand the marketing inclinations of Naim Audio, in particular moments when they promote product combinations that deserve to be treated separately. Take the DAC-V1 digital-to-analogue converter under consideration here and the NAP 100 power amplifier that I have been using for a couple of months. Look up most […]