The new centrepiece of your music system: DA converter and preamplifier
Remember your last great live music experience! The emotional impact and enrichment of your emotional and spiritual life that music can create. The reason for having a sophisticated music system in your own four walls is to be able to bring these magical moments home at any time.
As most music today is available in digital form – from CD to high-res streaming – the ACOUSENCE dac-pre DA converter preamplifier is the centrepiece of such a music system. The key to music lies in the adequate conversion of digital music data into analogue – “real” – music. This is where it is decided whether music is touching.
This core task is performed by the digital-to-analogue converter, or “dac” for short. At the same time, however, other supplementary tasks of a classic preamplifier are also included: The management of analogue sources including phono MM, as well as the direct control of the power amplifier or active loudspeakers via a high-quality volume control.
Less is more
Most of the important sound-related tasks are already combined in this one device. This offers great advantages, as a more complex set-up would only create unnecessary obstacles to the desired music enjoyment: many individual components need to be carefully combined and connected. Only the tasks that are better performed in separate units are outsourced. For the next stage, we offer the pow-amp power amplifier as the perfect complement. Our mu-se music server is the ideal player for organising the digital music data and controlling playback. The result is a lean and well-coordinated setup as an easy way to your personal music experience!
ddUSB (double-decoupled USB)
The UX in the name stands for a currently unique feature of the dac-pre-reference UX: an electrically isolated USB interface in which the electronics of the primary side are located outside the device housing in a small tube and a special component ensures an electrically isolated coupling to the secondary side and thus to the audio electronics in the housing at the exact level of the housing wall. This guarantees the purest sound without external interference.
ACOUSENCE did not previously offer a USB interface for good reason. Even though it is often used, the USB interface is the worst of all possible interfaces for audio. This is because, unlike AES/EBU, SPDIF or network, it could not be galvanically isolated. This meant that high-frequency interference from data processing in computers, music servers or streamers inevitably found its way directly into the sensitive audio environment. And there is always plenty of such high-frequency interference in such devices, as this is virtually the “operating noise” of this type of device.
Now, thanks to our new ddUSB development , this high-frequency interference is reliably kept outside the housing. A special component exactly in the plane of the housing wall creates a signal connection between the inside and outside without a direct physical connection, similar to an isolating transformer, for example.
In addition, the part of the device that controls the USB communication is galvanically isolated from the other digital signal processing in the device.
The USB input is therefore doubly decoupled from all sound-critical sections.
Variants
The ACOUSENCE dac-pre is available in two versions: The “standard” works with our sophisticated arfi DAC topology, i.e. four converter signals generate the stereo signal via a transformer I/V stage. The “reference” works with the arfi-reference DAC topology, i.e. eight converter signals generate the stereo signal via a premium transformer I/V stage. The rest of the equipment of both variants is adapted accordingly in terms of transmission quality. However, the musical characteristics of both versions are very similar and offer the pleasure of listening to music that is so important to us. However, the “reference” delivers a little more fine detail with even greater dynamics. As both variants are built on the same basis and the design is very modular, it is easy to upgrade from “standard” to “reference” at any time, even in several stages if necessary. In this way, the “standard” provides a cheaper introduction to music enjoyment via ACOUSENCE and can later be upgraded to the maximum expansion level of the “reference”.
