JV Visits dCS in England
Early this month I got to visit David Steven and his son David J., Chris, Martin, Andy, Rav, and all the other wonderful folks at dCS—designers and manufacturers of the two best digital products I’ve yet heard, the three-box Scarlatti and single-box Puccini CD/SACD players—at their offices in richly historical Cambridge, England. The occasion, ostensibly, was the introduction of two new dCS products: a stand-alone Scarlatti upconverter (which allows Scarlatti transport/DAC/clock owners to also use hard-drives and servers as sources, either importing data files at their native rate into the Scarlatti chain or upconverting them to any sampling rate between 44.1 and true DSD) and an outboard dedicated U-Clock for the single-box Puccini (about which I will have more to say in Part Two of this blog).
The three small interconnected buildings, situated in a British version of an industrial park, that house dCS were a little Alice in Wonderland-like. For a stranger like me the various buildings seemed at first like a maze of staircase and portholed doors, although by the end of a couple of days I could almost find my way among the several basic subsections of the buildings: sales, R&D, parts, assembly, testing, shipping, and a high-end (Verity loudspeakers, VTL amplifiers, Nordost cable and interconnect) listening room (about which I will have more to say in Part Two).
I will also have more to say about how dCS functions--and about the Puccini clock--in my next blog. For the nonce here is a brief photographic tour of dCS’s offices, beginning with a photo of the sales and administration department (that distinguished Peter O’Toole-looking fellow is David Steven, CEO of dCS), followed by a little corner of the R&D department where Chris and Andy work, a niche of the parts department, an assembly station, a photo of a dCS product under assembly, a small sampling of dCS’s sophisticated testing gear, a photo of a fully assembled Scarlatti circuit board being tested, stacks of packaged dCS products awaiting shipment, and, finally, dCS’s lovely little listening room.
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Comments
Hi Jonathan;
Thanks for your review of the Puccini and Scarlatti. I have been living with the Puccini in my system for a month or so and am looking forward to installing the Scarlatti after CES.
These are remarkable products. Like you, I have never heard digital sound this much like real music. The music seems to have the analog like capability of helping you get "lost in the music" while presenting a markedly different sonic profile. Different but equally convincing, I think.
I have two observations for your further reflection. First, I had always felt that one of the primary reasons that digital had a hard time providing the "suspension of disbilief" so esssential to the enjoyment of great music was the data density issue. 16 by 44.1 did not, in this view of the world, provide enough density to allow sampled PCM to remotely approach the "continuousness" of the original wave form.
Then allong comes the Puccini/ Scarlatti with their Ring DACs and suddenly CDs sound like music for the very first time. Did the Ring DAC approach allow the deeper recovery of low level signals that were always in the CD file but submerged by the inexorable math of the Least Significant Bits?
The second limitation of CD were the sharp filters used to amputate all frequencies above 22 kHz. New research reveals that there is considerable acoustic energy, mostly related to transients (in percussive instruments, for instance) above the 20 Hz threshold. Finally, this offers an explanation for an observed phenomena that has confounded me and many an audiophile I have discussed this with. At a listening session with Roy Gregory in the UK a couple of years ago, we observed that adding a supertweeter seemed to have noticable impact in the quality and definition of the bass frequencies. The observation seemed to defy logic at the time. Research now suggests that sharp transients can create considerable acoustic energy above 20KHz ( the extreme case is a cymbal crash which produces about 40% off its energy above 20kHz and some reaching up to, get this, 102 kHz.). There tends to be a fair amount of percussive (rather than harmonic) sound with LF producing instruments, drums, blocks, bass piano notes, and the like.
Viola, mystery solved?
In any event, we finally have an able digital contendor alongside the Walker Black Diamond. Bravo.