Digital Archive

For now my digital front end is a dCS Network Bridge feeding an Acoustic Plan Digimaster dac and Powermaster PSU.

The dCS is like a digital Swiss Army knife, it will stream from all the useful services out there, and will downsample the stream to suit whichever dac you’re using. dCS have sadly discontinued the Bridge, citing difficulty in obtaining parts and materials costs skyrocketing. I will count myself lucky I got one.

Acoustic Plan blurb on the Digimaster: “The D/A converter has probably the most consequent high resolution digital audio processing related to simplicity of all converters on the market nowadays. The USB as well as the SPDIF input have 192 kHz/ 24 bit receivers and they pass on the data stream to the 24 bit R2R converter PCM1704U-K. Neither upsampling nor oversampling nor are used to keep the data as pure as possible.
The USB data transfer works in an asynchronous mode, whereby the clock is determined by the high precision clock generator of the DigiMaster.
To avoid ground loops between a PC and the DigiMaster, the USB receiver circuit is powered by the PC whereas inductive couplers (iCoupler) provide the galvanic separation.
The principle of minimalistic circuit design is continued in the filter and in the analog stage. For that reason, only analog filters are used to cut off the undesirable ultrasonic frequency range. Depending on the sampling rate, the filters are switched to the proper cut off frequency. The analog filters consist custom made precision inductors and capacitors.
A pure tube output stage amplifies the small signals and provides a low output impedance.”
Additionally it utilises a pure tube output stage driven by NOS ECC86 triode tubes, it came with Philips ones, but I put in some Siemens tubes I had lying around for some reason.

I’ve used an Audioquest Carbon coaxial cable to connect the Bridge to the dac.

For cd playback I have an Acoustic Plan DriveMaster cd transport, which is connected via I2S to the Digimaster dac. This uses the amazing Philips CD Pro2 mechanism. It outputs via I2S to the Digimaster.  The SPDIF inputs  on the Digimaster have 192kHz/24 bit receivers and they pass on the data stream to the 24-bit R2R PCM1704U-K.

I even bought the fancy upgrade option of a metal remote control.

The Powermaster PSU powers both the dac and transport. The Acoustic Plan stuff is really well implemented and thought out and has a cool aesthetic. I recently heard that Claus has wound up Acoustic Plan, and is off sailing his yacht somewhere instead. A great shame as his products are superb.

I’m not concerned about high res streaming, or DSD or anything like that. The range of music available is so limited that it has no actual real significance to me. I used to use a music server, but have decided that Spotify, and of course cds, are perfectly adequate for my digital needs.

I was also using Tidal, and it is fine as a digital source, I just didn’t want to pay for two subscription streaming services. Who knows, I may revisit that in the future, especially given my ethical misgivings with Spotify…

I have decided there is something nice about playing actual cds, whether it is ‘better’ or not, I don’t care.