Channel Islands Audio VDA2 - Digital to Analog Converter

Traditional DAC designs use brick-wall digital filters, usually followed by more analog filtering to reduce sampling noise, but cause signal degradation in the process. Another approach has been to use no filtering at all, but this adds noise to the analog signal. Both of these designs have their strengths and weaknesses, but neither tends to be a good trade-off. Our design uses only a mild "slow roll-off" digital filter and first order analog filter to tame the sampling noise. This architecture has reduced filtering artifacts compared to brick-wall types, and lower sampling noise than filterless types, resulting in a more "analog" sound. Digital input signals are accepted by Toslink optical or coaxial SPDIF, then fed to the CS8416 24 bit/192k low jitter input receiver, then to the Burr Brown PCM1794 balanced/current output DAC. Our unique output stage is a fully discrete/zero feedback design and uses only a single transistor per output to insure the purity of the audio signal. Circuit board is high quality gold-plated 2 oz. copper with lead-free silver solder construction.