Rob Watts
Member of the Trade: Chord Electronics
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- Apr 1, 2014
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Just to clarify - the initial prototypes of Dave had slightly worse harmonic distortion than the dCS Vivaldi - which was the lowest harmonic distortion DAC in 2015 - and I wanted to improve on that simply from a measurement perspective. And when I had cracked the distortion problem, that led to better sound quality performance too.
But categorically there never was a design goal to beat the sound quality and the musical performance of the Vivaldi, nor for that matter any other DAC, as compared against the real benchmark of live un-amplified sound they are all inadequate. And they are all inadequate for solid technical reasons, such as transient timing reconstruction, small signal amplitude accuracy and noise floor modulation. Indeed, I can't think of any technical quality from any other DACs at any price (be it chip or custom designed) that I respect or admire. As I said, my only target to beat (or rather to match) is the sound of live un-amplified music and that is my only comparison.
But categorically there never was a design goal to beat the sound quality and the musical performance of the Vivaldi, nor for that matter any other DAC, as compared against the real benchmark of live un-amplified sound they are all inadequate. And they are all inadequate for solid technical reasons, such as transient timing reconstruction, small signal amplitude accuracy and noise floor modulation. Indeed, I can't think of any technical quality from any other DACs at any price (be it chip or custom designed) that I respect or admire. As I said, my only target to beat (or rather to match) is the sound of live un-amplified music and that is my only comparison.
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