Digital Processor Reviews

In hindsight, it was inevitable that two sophisticated digital audio technologies—software-based digital filters and Bitstream D/A converters—were destined to be married in one product. The software-based D/A converters offered by Krell, Wadia, and Theta all used multi-bit ladder DACs, and Bitstream-based units have previously relied on off-the-shelf digital filters.

A decade or two ago, I stumbled on a surprising demo room at an audio show. I don't recall most of the equipment, but I do remember a pair of Paradigm Studio 20 speakers at one end, their crossover entrails dangling free, connected to the rest of the system by a multiplicity of wires. At the other end, among the usual electronics, was a PC whose screen was a crazy quilt of graphs and menus that constantly twinkled in response to the ministrations of DEQX's Kim Ryrie. He seemed totally absorbed, but looked up and proudly offered to show me what he was doing. When I told him that I was familiar with the Paradigms, he played some music that sounded just fine. Then he clicked his mouse. The sound was transformed from the familiar to the fabulous. I was dumbfounded. "What have you done?"

There may have been a time when vacuum tubes and microprocessors seemed strange bedfellows. But nowadays—given the countless digital processors with tubed output stages, and an even greater number of tubed amps and preamps whose insides are crawling with the latest solid-state devices—we're more or less used to the idea. Here as elsewhere, hybrids are no big deal.

A reader recently asked if I preferred listening to loudspeakers or to headphones. There is no easy answer: Although I do most of my music listening through speakers, about 10% of that listening, for various reasons, takes place in the privacy of my headphones. I have also found that, since I purchased the Audeze LCD-X headphones following my review of them last March, I now tend to watch movies on my MacBook Pro, with the soundtrack reproduced by these headphones plugged into an AudioQuest DragonFly or whatever D/A headphone amplifier has been passing through my test lab. So when Meridian's PR person, Sue Toscano, asked me last Christmas if I'd be interested in reviewing the English company's new Prime D/A headphone amplifier ($2000) with its optional Prime Power Supply ($1295), it took me less than a New York minute to say "Yes."

Professional digital audio is like gravity to consumer audio's antigravity: pro gear draws music into digital files, and consumer audio releases those same notes back out again.

It's not surprising, then, that many audiophile digital-to-analog converters come to us from the pro-audio industry, which has a hierarchy similar to the consumer side: value-oriented products all the way up to ultimate-performance brands. Examples of pro-audio companies that also offer audiophile DACs for consumers abound: Benchmark, CEntrance, Grace Design, Korg, Mytek, and Nagra, to name a few.

They can't sound very good—they're not big enough. As we all know, in hi-fi, big products mean big performance. Musical Fidelity's V90 series can't be any good. They don't cost enough. With your golden ears, you must pay through the nose.

The V90 components turn all this around. They are tiny. Inexpensive. Beautifully built.

In the summer of 1999, Sony held a press event in New York City to mark the introduction of the Super Audio Compact Disc, then the sole domestic embodiment of the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) technology, jointly developed by Sony and Philips. The new format was hailed, in prepared remarks, by an impressive list of audio and music dignitaries: Nobuyuki Idei, then president of Sony Corporation; Steven Epstein, senior executive producer for Sony Classical; Yo-Yo Ma, appearing in a video created for the event; and Wynton Marsalis, appearing in person. All of the speeches—every single one of them—flattered SACD by likening its sound to that of the analog LP.