Audio Note DAC 1.1x

Dagogo Review

Extensive research into the fundamental properties of the data stream itself have shown beyond doubt that, regardless of the theoretical advantages of the signal manipulation employed in our competitors products, such as higher over sampling, noise shaping, re-clocking or jitter reduction, these corrective measures greatly interfere with the critical time domain requirements of the signal.

Music is a time continuum from start to end which when broken is irreparably damaged, and no amount of clever manipulation can restore it to its original time / frequency / amplitude duration or relationship, regardless of what the theorists may tell you.

As a result, we have developed a way of excluding or bypassing all these corrective measures, to allow the conversion from digital to analogue to be done without any manipulation whatsoever. All we do is to reformat the data stream to allow the converter chip to be able to interpolate the incoming information correctly.

In other words, the Audio Note (UK) DAC1.1x has no over sampling, no jitter reduction, no noise shaping and no re-clocking. Having removed all of the digital filtering that is required for over sampling, all filtering is done in the analogue domain where it is easier to retain good, wide band phase-frequency and dynamically coherent behaviour. It uses the highest grade Analogue Devices AD1865, 18Bit stereo converter chip solely because we found it to be the best sounding available (yes, even better than the 20Bit versions!).

The DAC1.1x/II Signature also features an abundance of upgraded components in comparison with the standard edition, including our own Audio Note (UK) Tantalum resistors in key areas.