I think the obvious market for DAVE will be the classical music genre. I am not in that camp particularly but I think it is already clear that Rob Watts has opened a new door on what can be achieved in audio imaging depth and I suspect will change the whole industry in this respect over time. Because orchestrations are mic'd at distance, DAVE would seem an obvious choice for audiophiles who love classical music. I suspect this was in Rob's mind when designing the superior DSD filter as this is the one genre where DSD has established itself.
Can you imagine hearing that level of broad imaging for orchestrations and not falling in love with the realism? For a while I would expect Chord to have a captive market in that space. Classical music will be responsible for the sale of many Dave DACs imo.
It will be a harder sell in 'close mic'd genres' of course but that will come down to an assessment of the pure musical delivery I think and we have yet to hear a professional review of those capabilities.
Good luck to Chord and Rob Watts. I have to admire them.
Thank you for your kind comments.
The perception of depth is a weird phenomena and something we take for granted. I am on holiday in Catalan, Spain and yesterday visited the monastery at Montserrat. We went for a walk, and was about a mile out viewing the monastery; the bells peeled out. The perception of depth was stunning, shut ones eyes and you can hear the bells a mile away with amazing accuracy.
Then we were lucky enough to hear the choir in the basilica. I was 150 feet away, and again, shut ones eyes and the sound was 150 feet away. It was glorious.
But the amazing thing is how the brain manages to compute depth from very tiny cues and get it to such accuracy and we take it entirely for granted.
So far early versions of Dave has been shown at a few shows and listeners have reported back about how unusual the depth perception is with Dave. Now this is due to the DAC resolving accuracy of very small signals - for some reason any small non-linearity of small signals upsets the brains ability to determine depth. What is curious is that there seems to be no limit to how accurate the linearity needs to be; Dave's noise shapers are accurate to -350 dB and this was the performance required by depth perception. Indeed, the brain may be sensitive to even smaller levels, but 350 dB is the best I can do with current FPGA's. But if you had said 2 years ago that one would need 350 dB performance from a noise shaper to get proper depth perception I would have said you were completely mad, as this is ridiculously small levels. But I have done thousands of depth listening tests, and always came to the same conclusion - very very small errors are significant. No doubt the sound science brigade will be on my back about this; but sound science is about observation not pet theories; and the observations are saying that something very weird is going on about depth perception (something which our understanding of how the brain achieves this level of accuracy is very limited).
Getting back to Dave and classical music. Sure classical music is not close miked, and so perceiving depth would be beneficial to that genre. But depth is often added in recordings by adding reverb. Also, its about small signal linearity which is useful for detail resolution as well as depth perception. But because Dave's depth perception is so much deeper than other DAC's its easy to latch onto that aspect of performance - its about four times deeper with recordings that have good depth than Hugo for example. But there is a lot more to Dave than just depth.
On the design of Dave, I was at one point improving smoothness and warmth. It got richer and darker, almost to the point where it sounded too dark and smooth - transients were starting to sound soft. Now this aspect was based on solid engineering, that of improving noise floor modulation, so I knew it was more transparent for certain. But it was sounding too rich and dark. Now that's OK - nobody knows what a perfect DAC sounds like (neutral just means average really), so I was prepared to live with it. But then I discovered what Hugo's ability to resolve the timing of notes - the perception of instruments starting and stopping - came from, and once found it I could maximise it due to the size available on the FPGA.
By maximising the timing aspect, I got Dave to sound much faster, tighter and leaner - the perfect remedy to something sounding too soft and smooth. Now again this performance is engineering based and is fundamentally more accurate and transparent.
So what does this mean? Well against Hugo, Dave has much more depth, which you can easily perceive and you don't need to do an AB test. If you hear depth that is deeper than anything ever heard from an audio system then you know something is better. But with Dave being at the same time faster tighter and more dynamic and also richer and darker than Hugo, then you need to do an AB test to perceive that aspect.
And another point - depth is really useful for AV, a lot of depth is recorded onto films and it really makes a big difference to enjoyment having a huge sound stage.
Rob
