BRIAN ZOLNER, Bricasti Design
Brian Zolner provides an educational outpouring of information on the latest Bricasti products encompassing his thoughts on DACs, USB, DSD and more.
Interested in how DACs work? Whether DSD files are worth having? Why USB has problems? Don’t miss this fascinating interview.
The last time we interviewed Brian Zolner, the ‘Bri’ in Bricasti Design, we learned a good deal, and were especially taken with his explanation of why hardly any digital DSD recordings are really truly DSD, and why most of the few that are, aren’t worth having. This time we interviewed Brian Zolner during last year’s Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show, where Bricasti was showing its new M21 and its recent M5 in the suite of its distributor, Studio Connections Australia.
To briefly recap the story so far, Bricasti Design was formed by two former employees of Lexicon, joined subsequently by engineers from Madrigal Laboratories. The company’s first product was for the professional market, the M7 reverb unit. But it was the first consumer product, the M1 DAC, which brought Bricasti to the attention of audiophiles in the home. It straddled both pro and high-end consumer camps with its generous connecting options and solid build quality, and won praise especially for the results of its built-fromfirst-principles digital engineering, notably in using Bricasti’s own reconstruction filters rather than adopting one of the popular DAC chips.
The result was an ongoing stream of panegyric reviews for the M1 from the hi-fi press, including a DAC of the Year award from our own team at Sound+Image, followed by more for the M28 monobloc power amplifier, which along with an M15 stereo integrated amp and the M12 source controller, allowed Bricasti to offer a complete system solution. It also introduced a shiny chrome-style finish for what is called the Platinum Series, currently limited to the M12 source controller and the new M21.
The smaller M5 came next, this being a network player with digital but not analogue outputs (so a DAC is still required). And debuting at the Show was the M21, which is listed by Bricasti as another stereo DAC, same as the M1. So we asked Brian Zolner to explain the expanded range, and particularly what differentiates the more expensive M21 from the original M1, and from the M12. The answer to this and all the questions surrounding it took about 45 minutes, and you’ll note we didn’t say much ourselves in that time. Mr Zolner is an excellent interviewee, and his thought streams so congruent that it’s almost impossible to edit his speech other than to clean up hesitations and repetitions. We thought it enjoyable enough to bring it to you here in pretty much its entirety.
SOUND+IMAGE: So tell us about the M5 and the new M21.
BRIAN ZOLNER: So we have the M5 which we announced a year ago, but we also launched before that the M12. And the idea of the M12 was
what I call a source controller; it has analogue in, digital ins, so it’s a nice front-end for somebody, a preamp/DAC. And we developed the network rendering streaming interface for that product, and designed that card — the physical shape of it, how it mounts — so it could be retrofitted into any M1. So it fits in the M12, it can be put into an M1 or M1 DAC, so people can upgrade if they want, or they can order it with that.
And then I realised I could put that in its own little box. So the M5 is this little box with the analogue power supply out of the M1 powering the network interface, and that drops down to a card we made that has a SHARC (processor) on it, and with AES and SPDIF out. Because the real idea of the product was not to use USB, the whole advantage is saying ‘let’s do this without USB’, OK? So this M5 can sit close to the system, or it could be further away because it’s going to go SPDIF or AES; it can go halfway around the room, who cares? And the computer is hidden back here or in the other room, another part of your house; who cares where, the network takes it.
S+I: And that you see as important for convenience or for electrical separation?
BZ: Well the whole idea of this, from my perspective, from when I started to make these things, is that I make them for myself. And I said, you know, I don’t want that damned computer near me, and I don’t want to spend a pile of money on some server thing that’s just a computer in a box that sits there and you’re back to USB. Because you want to get that out, and if it’s USB you can’t, it’s got to be close.
So the M5 allows you to take from wherever your source is — it happens to be this laptop for the show, or in my home it sits up on the second floor of my house — and I play it remotely from here. I use JRiver because I like JRemote [the JRiver remote app for tablet or phone] but you can use other apps — you can have an app just on your phone and then the phone becomes the library manager... Bubble or mConnect, you can do all these things. So the idea is to get this out of your listening environment, clean it all up, get that noisy drive, all that crap out of the way. And then the advantage comes also in that the M5 is a product that anybody can use, with the same features — DLNA, Roon Ready, UPnP device — and it comes out AES or SPDIF, or USB.
S+I: So explain why USB has problems; a lot of us play USB from our computer. Can you explain the problems with that?
BZ: Well... this all gets very sort of subjectively audiophile craziness.
S+I: Well that’s fine because we do that. BZ: [Laughs.] OK, you know, one would say it shouldn’t matter, right? And I think technically from the pure data point of view it probably doesn’t matter, depending on how things are done. But I believe the issue with USB is that first it’s not really made to do this. USB was really meant to be a thumb drive or just a point-to-point thing. It’s not meant for real-time transfer. What’s going on in the network now is not real-time. It’s pulling a drive, buffering it and playing it.
So it’s not real-time streaming of audio. Now you take an interface and you’re trying to do that. Of course it can be done, and was done.
But also I think the issue resides in the fact that the interface needs to be powered. And that power has to come from the computer, because that’s how it’s supposed to work. So you have, you know, even in our M1 and all our products, we galvanically isolate that from the product. But nonetheless it’s all in there, right? So you have to say, OK what has it done on hearing.
And my experimentation and research tells me it has to do with power. Because I used to take my computer, plug it in, and if it ran it on the battery I could hear a difference. It’s better. Got rid of the hash. Not all of it, but a lot of it. OK. Then you have another level of hash which is the motherboard in any computer, I don’t care — any board you buy, unless you do it like we did in the M5, where we made a small card with an ARM processor running a Linux core. That’s what an ARM processor is for, to say ‘reduced instruction set’ — it’s only going to do what you stick on it. In the computer world there’s things doing all kinds of shit, because it’s got to support it — not that it doesn’t work, it works fine. But you have all these different voltages that are being regulated because the power comes into a laptop or something at 19 volts, you’ve got to get five volts out for this, you’ve got to get all the one volts, three volts for the digital things inside the computer all the time.
So all of this has to be regulated, and it’s all done with digital regulation because you’re not going to do it in analogue — I can tell you that, because I know what I face with our products as we run everything analogue! If you run the digital part with an analogue supply, you know, suddenly “it doesn’t work, it crapped out on me, what happened?” Well the voltage dropped, sorry, that’s why you use a switchmode supply on digital stuff because you can’t afford to lose it. In analogue, analogue power goes down low, OK maybe distortion goes up a little bit but it still works — you don’t get as much power out of the amplifier or something. But with digital it’s dead. So getting back to the
“These things... I make them for myself. And I said, you know, I don’t want that damned computer near me, and I don’t want to spend a pile of money on some server thing that’s just a computer in a box...
computer world that’s why all the regulation on the board is digital. There is no way you’re going to create all these voltages linear. And so you didn’t really win anything.
So that was the reason I found. But primarily it was the convenience of getting that thing out of my room and saying, well, OK, then you gotta have something like this.
S+I: Back the 1990s you wouldn’t be seen dead with a computer in your hi-fi listening room. Now we live with them next to our hi-fi, inside our hi-fi.
BZ: Well everybody’s been making records for the last 20 years with computer. Some people maybe make token tape recordings. But that’s just token.
S+I: So are we cursed at source with this?
BZ: Well no, in the professional use, you know, you aren’t using USB most of the time. But there are issues like that throughout the chain. But nonetheless, all we can deal with in this situation is what we’re playing back.
But that’s what I noticed, that it was done initially because of convenience, but then once we got it going I said, wow that’s better. It’s a lot better. Because that data can be anywhere on the network, it can be on my phone, can be on a NAS, could be from the cloud, wherever the server’s going to pick it up from. So I certainly use this as my ‘server’, I use that word because it’s where I let the app reside — here. I find I prefer to just do that. People think they want to get around that and they say, oh I just want to play from the NAS, and you can kind of do that, but then there’s a processor in the NAS. There’s a computer in there. People think that ‘oh I don’t need that computer’, but they have one in the NAS and then they’re kind of hamstrung because you can’t do anything.
S+I: And variable server software, the DLNA won’t order albums in the right way and so on. BZ: All that stuff — let’s call it library management, you’re going to have to flip your computer open and straighten this out. Right. So my life and the way I do it, I gave up. I just love this little laptop I’ve been using for years. It’s just running Windows 7 and all I ever use it for is audio. When I get home next week, I’ll go upstairs, plug it into the network, turn it on, change the library, take that M21 that I’m carrying home with me, turn it on, and ten minutes later I’m playing. And it just sits there, I leave it on, it’s got a solid state drive, it’s just on. So I never turn my system off and on — it’s stable, it’s all IP addressed, all that stuff gets sorted out. I come here today, I turn it on, bang, spot on, it’s stable.
So basically we’ve made our own Linux player. We could, with a bit more work, turn it into a server. But why do that? Because then I’m in the app business. I don’t want to be in the app business. We could stick it on there, license an app from somebody or put jRiver on there, license it from those guys. But then you’re supporting that. And it doesn’t have to live there, that’s the point. There’s no real advantage for it to live there because you’re still back to the same problem — I’ve got to keep my database sorted out, how am I going to look at it, I want to rip a CD, all this stuff, all this maintenance. However you do it, it’s not magic — it’s like organising your albums in the old days, you’ve got to be able to find it, and get it and play it. People make it more complicated than it is. If you use Roon, that’s what Roon tells you to do, Roon says you use a core. That’s how you do it. Well that’s what I’m doing, this is my core. It’s the same thing, I’m using this as my core.
S+I: Nobody’s explained to me what the criterion for ‘Roon Ready’ actually is.
BZ: All it is saying, OK, all it is, is their version of DLNA. So they took that type of a protocol and made little tweaks. They said OK you’ve got to have it work our way, so now we’ve got to comply with us and we’re going to test the... yada yada the whole thing.
S+I: And they go through a testing procedure? BZ: Yes, and then we’ve got to give them a unit and all that crap and, arrrgh, it knocks on to all kinds of things, because they want to do all kinds of shit that you don’t really want... anyway...
S+I: So that’s a tough decision, which you choose to license...
BZ: Very expensive, costly, for us — time-wise, development. It’s not Roon, it’s us implementing what they want.
S+I: Do they change criteria or is it a pretty fixed protocol?
BZ: It’s fixed, but the point is we had to do a lot of work, we had to reinvent stuff... Is it worth it? I don’t know. I tell guys, use what you want. I find that the most important criteria for a user is once they get used to an app, they don’t want change. That’s far more important here than some twiddly little — maybe does it sound a little different? It shouldn’t really matter. You’re just sending the files over. And the rendering is done here. We do the rendering. So the app isn’t doing it. In our testing, I got my guy in L.A., he’s got a Mac and a PC, I let him have all the apps — I don’t want to waste my time with that, but somebody’s got to do it. But he’s got Roon, he’s played with Audirvana; he says it doesn’t matter.
S+I: So preferred connection between the M5 and the DAC? Not USB then?
BZ: That’s another point of discussion, because the idea was not to use USB. And I tested it in a way that no user can — well a user could, but no user typically can — because everything with that is very speculative and very subjective. You have no grounding point in anything, so to change something — sure it changed, but is it better or worse? Theoretically you’re sort of after the truth; that’s the whole idea, right? Well it’s supposed to be, but it’s not. The problem is, how do you ground yourself? So in this case I take the same file, same cables, simultaneously playing to the M5 and say in this case to the M21, same streamer, same everything right, in both products. I go into the M12 or the M1 or the M21, the same streamer card’s there and it drops I2S right to the DSP. And then out to get converted. In the M5, I2S right to the DSP — AES, S/PDIF, USB. So you can play the same track at the same time and switch. And of course the level’s perfect because it’s digital, you don’t have that issue, and you start listening.
And what I come to is that the truth is very close between the AES and the SPDIF. The USB is not, and you hear why — you hear the noise and the hash. And the USB sounds more exciting, more lively, because of the noise. Noise does that; distortion does that. Various types of distortion will create thickness, loudness, apparent loudness, apparent width of the stage, you know, because it’s kind of ‘shaking guys up’. If it’s still, what you’ll have is a more clear deeper
soundstage, looking at it that way. And if it’s bit noisy it’s going to go wider and excite things more — maybe you think it’s detail, but it’s not resolution. The best resolution is hearing nothing, it’s transparency. But most people don’t understand that, they think something’s missing. But my listening says that it’s the closest to the original, okay, and that’s the only thing you can hang it on.
Look, they all work, you’re talking subtleties, and the important thing is it works, and they all sound fine, it’s not like one of them is horribly bad. To me the USB has more of a ‘sound’, and I attribute it to the noise, although you know the USB out of the M5 is probably better than a computer at USB because it’s all linear, the five volts is derived straight out of the linear supply, there’s no extra processors going on, it’s not like the supply had to go through digital regulation to get there. The regulation of the USB goes directly from the linear supply.
S+I: You have Wi-Fi for the M5, but you’ve done it via a dongle, why?
BZ: Well it won’t work inside.
S+I: Because it’s too well constructed.
BZ: Yeh! (Laughs.] You know you put a dongle on the back of one of these and the router is over here and it won’t work, I spun it around and it worked. Then I stuck a USB extension cable and stuck it out on the shelf and it worked. And that’s why really I don’t recommend using Wi-Fi for this application, because yes I can play Wi-Fi in my home and I can play tracks from my work computer to the M5, I could talk to the router, it goes out to the Ethernet and it works, no problem. But I wouldn’t rely on that, because the Wi-Fi is flaky, depending on the weather, depending on where in room you’re sitting, the weather changes and the wind blows and it changes. It does. So just run the wire. Or I’ve got a guy who runs it from the second floor of his house but then he’s got a dedicated wireless connection, not Wi-Fi, it’s a wireless link. And that’s solid because you’re not trying to do anything else but link these two together. If you can, run the Cat 5.
S+I: And then the M21.
BZ:The M21, this is the debut of it — and this is the M21 in the Platinum series. We made an M12 and M21 in a Platinum series, mostly for the Asian market.
S+I: Right. Like shiny.
BZ: Yeh, they like shiny. But you know, I sit and look at it and I like it. What I like about it is it blends — the reflection. Look, it’s matching the speaker, right? The other products stand out as boxes; that one matches everything! I sit in my home and it matches my décor, matches my furniture. S+I: Yes, but what does it do?
BZ: What does it do, yes. So this is an evolution. The M12 was meant to be a preamp/DAC. In other words you really can’t use it as just a DAC. We have a nice analogue level control on the M12 because it has an analogue in, and to manage the DSD we did a pure DSD one-bit, and that’s all managed, all the transitions of fading it out, fading in, adjusting the gain between all the data paths and the inputs, it’s all done with the ladder volume control. All in the background. Seamless, right?
So then you go, OK, so I could modify it to make it work as a DAC, which means you turn the volume all the way up, the ladder essentially is out. But the way it’s been made, the way it adjusts the gains — it’s not really the idea of the product, which was to be a nice front end to simplify your life, with a great preamp function.
But then you realise, well, everybody’s got their favourite ‘XYZ2’ preamp they like to use. So I make the M21, which is a DAC-preamp. And the preamp function is secondary. It doesn’t have analogue inputs, so you turn the volume up to zero, and it hard bypasses. The only time the attenuator comes in is for transitions. So all the transitions are done in analogue, not in digital on the M21 — fade in, fade out, mute. Whereas most people buy a chip and the chip does it all — it does everything, you know, because it’s PCM. That happens in the digital domain on all DACs, chips and stuff.
But with DSD, you can’t do it, because it’s not DSD any more. So we do it all analogue. And now somebody can have our direct DSD interface, streaming all this stuff and you can just use it as a DAC. Or, turn the volume and guess what, you have an analogue attenuator. So you can use it without the worry of a digital attenuator, or the concern of a digital attenuator — which is partially unfounded when you really look at it... the M1 has a digital attenuator.
S+I: What do people fear in digital attenuators? BZ: Losing bits.
S+I: And remapping data?
BZ: Yeh but (whispering) it’s a 24-bit converter, I mean practically 20 bits in reality, and most of the music you play has got about three bits, four bits of dynamic range, it’s all chocked up to the top. You’ve got a ways to go before you lose anything, But people are told this — and this is old news from old DACs, old ladder DACs from 25 or 30 years ago that were barely 12 bits of performance and you couldn’t
afford to lose anything. So that really didn’t work in the old days. People are full of old news and old stuff! But a modern converter, it works really well. But here it’s done analogue, so it ticks that checkbox, right, you don’t have to worry about it. And of course to do DSD you have to do it.
S+I: Now we did cover some of that in a previous interview but for those who didn’t read it, give us in a nutshell the direct DSD argument of why you can’t do anything with DSD and why a lot of DSD isn’t really DSD. BZ: OK, well the first thing is, DSD is one-bit. And one times one equals one. So you can’t do any mathematical computation. You have to have more than one bit to make a volume change, to make a level change — you have to convert it to a multiple-bit signal to be able to do any digital signal processing, it’s just not possible otherwise. And there’s a lot of lies out there — well that’s a hard word, but everybody kind of goes, ‘oh well, yeah, we sort of do that anyway’.
So basically what happens in production is that if you do capture something in DSD today — well first thing, the A-to-D converter is sigma-delta, it’s not a DSD converter, but it’s generating a one-bit file. Then when you go into post-production, you have to convert it, and typically it gets converted to DXD 352.8/24-bit, because you might as well convert it to that. The old Sony Sonoma workstation which died a long time ago sort of did this five-bit thing, but then you know, I think what happened is that if you’re going to convert it, you might as well just take it to 352.8kHz and then you have 24 bits and you can do everything; you’re not, like, hamstrung by some special process. And that’s damned good, mind you.
OK, so then it gets converted back again. And the issue is that every time you do that, it goes through filters, and you hear the filters, and I can demonstrate that. But in this case most every DAC, let’s say if there’s 100 DACs, then 98 of them convert it to PCM of some sort. Our M1 does, because that’s how it works, it’s a sigma-delta converter.
S+I: And can you chunk it up and then volume control it and then put it back to one-bit non-destructively?
BZ: No, it has its price to pay. That’s the point, you can hear it. I talk with all the guys that make recordings and I’m telling you, there’s a price to pay for everything.
It’s digital processing, it gets processed, it gets filtered, it gets chunked up and put back together and you go ‘where’s the magic?’ I can demonstrate, I’ve got raw DSD from Channel Classics and you hear DSD on this (points to the Bricasti system) and you never heard DSD before, you really get an experience for it. But it’s kind of like I said — it’s a candy bar you can’t have, because you can’t put out recordings without editing. I mean you really can’t.
S+I: Pretty much impossible, commercially, one continuous take. Even classical is edited...
BZ: Hundreds of recording edits! But in the purest sense of DSD, something that’s acoustically captured, not an analogue transfer from 50 years ago — and that’s not DSD, sorry, it’s not, it’s an analogue tape, it’s going to sound different, not DSD. And you capture something, you know, there’s very little of that. And it comes down to ‘recordings of merit’ — nobody makes a recording of merit taking the recorder out and recording it and then sending it out to everybody. Sorry, you don’t get there, you don’t get Grammys, you don’t get the world’s best orchestras and recordings, that’s what I mean by recordings of merit. You don’t go to the Melbourne Symphony and make a recording that way and expect it to be the best, you know. Chandos comes in and does it right. It’s a serious recording, and you aren’t going to do that with a two-channel Korg recorder running DSD. That’s the garage guys, right? You might have some guy plonking on his guitar and saying that’s quad-DSD with a guy plonking on his
guitar — well who’s that guy? I don’t know. Is the microphone any good? Well actually it kind of sucks, you know? Making good recordings is an art, to capture that in a perspective, so that you, the listener, feel like you’re there. It’s hard to do that with just two microphones; we don’t hear that way and the microphones don’t hear like we hear. So the art of it is trying to capture that, present it to the listener in the false recording situation that we’re trying to create of a believable situation, that you can hear the instruments.
Anyway the point is that I listen to this stuff and it wouldn’t matter what you recorded it on, it’s still useless, who cares if it’s analogue tape or 96k, 44.1, 48, DSD — if the recording sucks, who cares, right? I’ve got DSD stuff, I’ve got all kinds, I just try to play nice music that I know is well recorded that plays nice.
The point is that the DSD thing presents an impossible situation. All we’re doing, and I figured I could do with the M12 or the M21 in this case, is at least allow the user to peel the onion back one layer. Because when you go into your average DAC, some DACs — a very famous DAC chip that everybody uses, a SABRE chip, literally sample rate converts everything. That’s how it works. They won’t spec anything, you can’t find out anything about it, so they’ll take in anything, but it’s going to gearbox it through a sample rate converter (SRC). You don’t know what it does, they don’t tell you. So it sample-rate converts everything to a fixed rate. This is how the benchmark works, for years and years and years; they are the first ones that did that.
Now you go through an SRC because that reduces your jitter, because you’ve re-clocked everything. But now you’ve gearboxed it, you’ve filtered it, and that’s how that part works. So it’s not DSD. So the problem to try to overcome, which we did a very different way in our products, is how do you reduce jitter? You have to resample it, because that’s the problem, you have an incoming and an outgoing that has to be matched, and you can’t match them all the time. Because they’re drifting ever so slightly. So you always have to figure out how to do that. If you ‘chop it’ and redo it against your new clock, — and the easy way is with a rate converter because you can put a fixed clock, and a fixed crystal on your output — you solve the problem. But now you’ve converted everything to that rate, you’ve remapped everything and you’ve got to go through filters, and there’s the ‘gotcha’.
So we don’t do that. We do like a digitally synthesized PLL. And then the data comes in, and we re-clock the data, we don’t convert it though, against our clock — you buffer it, so if it comes in at 48k, it’s going to say ‘all right now we’re going to buffer it, we know it’s supposed to be 48k, we’re going to look at the incoming clock, now we’re going to put our 48k clock, and watch what goes on’. OK? You’re always doing a dance to try to keep these things without converting.
Now upsampling, oversampling, that’s something else; that’s taking that data, at say 48kHz, and the way our M1 works, our sigma-delta, is that you 8× oversample — you haven’t converted it, you’ve just made a multiple of the base rate. If you had a source of 352.8k it does nothing. It’s already there. And it goes over to the modulator and that modulator creates 2.8MHz, 5 bits, so basically converts it to DSD. That’s how they work. I mean to listen to these guys, this one product that does all this crazy upsampling and all this stuff, it’s like going all the way around the house this way to get in the front door; let’s just walk in the front door. But that’s how a sigma-delta converter works. They’re basically quasi-DSD engines, multi-bit DSD devices, because then you can solve all these problems. So that’s how that stuff works, it’s always worked.
S+I: And five bits is enough steps...
BZ: To do what you need to do, in this case. It works great. We do the oversampling in our processors, our SHARC, our DSP. When you oversample, you have eight times the data points, to interpolate the antialiasing filter. You have literally steps, as fine as they are, and now you’ve made eight times the steps. It’s the interpolation of the filter which is why you oversample. Because the next enemy along the path is the filter. So you have clocking, enemy one. Enemy two is creating these filters, especially at 44.1 where you have to make a very steep filter, because you have to go from 20kHz down to 22kHz and drop at least 100dB. You can’t do that in analogue, so you do that in the digital domain, and that’s why you make your upsampling; now you can make a better filter. It’s a solver of a problem that you can’t solve any other way, practically. So if you don’t do that, your filter is not going to be as good. And you’ll hear your filter more. Enemy, right?
S+I: How are you going to explain to someone that the M12 is a preamp and DAC, whereas the M21 is a DAC and preamp, without having a conversation like this?
BZ: [Laughs.] Well. I tell people the products are made primarily for people’s needs. I say OK if you don’t listen to DSD, or you do and it’s not that important to you, what we did in the M1 is very good. We do the filter and bring it over in the SHARC and directly to the sigma-delta and out it goes. It’s really good, as good as anybody can do in that environment. And with our clocking and all that stuff, we’re not remapping it, all that shit, so it’s really good. And if you’re going to use a preamp or you don’t have the budget, our M1 might be the product for you.
If you say, well, I want to simplify my life, I want to play and plug my phono preamp in, then you can take the M12, put it all together.
And if you say DSD is important to me, and I want to use my preamp, then you can take the M21.
So it’s more a matter of ‘me’, it’s not like, OK which one is better? They all have their character, because they are different products and have different treatments in various ways, and of course as we know everything always sounds different. An M1 sounds like an M1, and it’s a lovely sounding product, people love it and it’s got a good vibe to it. And the M21 has got a different vibe, it’s not an M1. And I try to make things to make it different. I want it to be different. I don’t want it to be the same. A lot of people listen to it and say it’s different, and they can judge if it’s better or worse for them. But it’s our latest product and I believe it’s the best thing we ever did.
And then the last thing I did, when I was making this new top-layer board which is not going to have any analogue ins, I put a different attenuator in, because we were going to use it in transitions, and the thing sounds great anyway. But hey, everybody talks about the ladder DAC, so I put a ladder DAC in there. So now you have three DACs in there — you have a sigma-delta, a ladder for PCM, and the DSD. Check-box, check-box, check-box... You like that? You have it.
More info: www.studioconnections.com.au
“Theoretically you’re sort of after the truth; that’s the whole idea, right? Well it’s supposed to be, but it’s not. The problem is, how do you ground yourself?