Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Audio Consulting Silver Rock OPT NOS DAC














There are a lot of opinions that analogue is better than digital sound.

It took us some decades to achieve analogue front ends that really show what can be revealed from LP’s.

Our customers and us are really surprised by what can be heard on Vinyl, despite the obvious mechanical limitations.

Provided the recording is of good quality, there are lots of musical emotions to be had.

Provided the recording is of good quality…why this can be a problem is marvellously described in Greg Milner’s book: “Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music”.

There must be a reason why we always end up listening to LP’s from the late 1950ies or early 1960ies, some even mono…

What has happened to the sound in the 1970ies, 1980ies, 1990ies?

Well you have to read Greg Milner’s book.

Starting in the 1970ies with the first digitally recorded masters and LP’s that were produced out of it, we were told that digital was “perfection”.

That was even more so when CD became available in the early 1980ies.

Unfortunately this was not the case and digital sound became famous for: “harshness, lack of harmonics, lack of decay etc.”.

Even today we tend to say that this “particular digital” front end is so good that it almost sounds “analogue”, meaning that analogue still is the reference.

It took us over 30 years of research here at Audio Consulting in order to understand why CD players, flash card readers and DAC’s may sound so boring.

And it is definitely not enough, just to add a tube output stage in order to compensate for it.

The DAC that we have developed is a very special one…

Of course it is fully battery powered (4 batteries in fact), of course it uses a Silver Rock output and amplifying transformer, and of course it uses non-oversampling technology.

What is the result?  Well what do you expect us to say?
Try to listen to a system using it…


For those who believe in technical specs, here are a few:

16bit / 44.1 KHz; 24bit / 96 KHz; 24bit / 192 KHz compatibility
Four batteries are powering the circuits
A non feed-back buffer stage is driving the gain and output Silver Rock transformer
Internal wiring using our silver wire with cotton tubing
Assembled using our custom made 10% silver solder Mundorf CH Precision
XLR output connectors available instead of RCA at no extra cost
Absolute phase switch available at extra cost
Price:  CHF 28’500.00 , with absolute phase switch CHF 31’000.00