Budget Component Reviews

In 1989, I bought my second pair of Rogers LS3/5a's from a guy on Staten Island who had them hooked up to a Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amplifier. After playing the speakers for me, he began removing his zip-cord speaker cables and paused to show me how, at the amplifier end, his red-plastic Pomona Electronics banana plugs had partially melted from the A1's heat. We both laughed.

After it first appeared in 1985, the A1 quickly became famous for its hot top plate. The top plate got as hot as it did because it was used as a heatsink for the output transistors, which were biased highly into class-A. The A1's hot top made tabloid headlines, but for me it was its bold, sinewy, un-transistory sound and timeless, sharply drawn styling that distinguished it from cooler running Brit-fi competitors such as Audiolab's 8000A, Creek's 4040, A&R Cambridge's A60, and NAD's 3020.

Now it's back, priced at $1779, looking and feeling cooler than before.

The M1 DAC is by Musical Fidelity. At $699, it's a stunning bargain. Comparing it to $995 for the Digilog in 1989. Meanwhile, the M1 is far more versatile, way better built, and, if memory serves me right, sounds vastly better.

It appears that the way to sell a DAC in 2011 is to almost give it away, in real-dollar terms. Some people pay far more than this for a set of speaker cables, a pair of interconnects, even a power cord. The M1 DAC is a piece of kit that can transform your system. I kid you not.

"The victor belongs to the spoils."—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned, 1922

A computer is not optimized for the uninterrupted streaming of audio data. It has rapidly become established wisdom, therefore, that the optimal means of extracting audio data from a computer's USB port is to operate that port in what is called "asynchronous isochronous" mode. This lets the receiving device, such as a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), control the flow of data from the PC. In theory, asynchronous USB operation (not to be confused with the asynchronous sample-rate conversion used in some DACs) reduces jitter to unmeasurable levels, depending on the accuracy of the receiver's fixed-frequency oscillator, which is used to clock the data to the DAC. By contrast, in the alternative and almost ubiquitous USB operating mode, called "adaptive isochronous," while the sample rate of the output data, averaged over a longish period, will indeed be the specified 44.1 or 48kHz, there will be short-term fluctuations, or jitter, due to the oscillator having to change its frequency every millisecond to match the uncertain rate of data flow from the PC.

Not being fond of self-flagellation, I don't usually do analog. I am not a fuddy-dudley, nor am I especially fremerous.

The X-DAC v3 replaces Musical Fidelity's Tri-Vista 21 DAC, which is no longer in production, although you might find some on dealer's shelves. The Tri-Vista 21 used two pairs of subminiature 5703 WB military tubes in the analog output stage. MF's Antony Michaelson called this Cold War tube, which is no longer made, a trivistor. The Tri-Vista 21 was last seen selling for $2395.

Specialization seems to be an inevitable consequence of progress: As the products of man and God become more and more complex, they're called on to do fewer things in more focused ways.