Article: Review | Berkeley Audio Design Alpha DAC Reference Series 3

[Danny Kaey]

GREAT write-up Chris. I love how they are sticking to their guns, despite no doubt losing sales to those who need/want the latest and greatest three letter acronym flavor of the month. Not an easy thing to do - similar perhaps to Einstein's insistence that running more than 4 transistors per channel mucks up the sound and thus lowers the resolution and transparency to the source. I'm sure there's many other similar companies that chose to stay on their straight and narrow path.

 

Good for them!

 

 

[Danny Kaey]

21 hours ago, ted_b said:

?  DSD is hardly a flavor of the month.  Been around for years, and a recording format chosen by some very accomplished folks in the industry.  Just sayin'. 

 

True story. That said, one could argue that 1-bit delta sigma has been around since the mid 60s when Denon first started futzing with it... I have yet to hear - conclusively - that DSD or PCM or MQA or any of these formats sound "superior" to each other, nor that it matters even if they did because hardly any mainstream recording takes advantage of even 16 bit resolution, dynamics and innate transparency. So this to me is the equivalent of pixel peeping: it's completely irrelevant in the real world.