December 11 2011
Reviewer: Jörg Dames
Sources: Fonel Simplicité, laptop w. foobar2000/J River MC, Northstar USB dac32, Benchmark DAC1 USB
Amplification: Fonel Emotion, Abacus Ampino, Funk MTX Monitor V3b, Audionet AMP Monos
Loudspeakers: Thiel CS 3.7, Sehring S 703SE
Cables: Straight Wire Virtuoso, Vovox, HMS Fortissimo, Reson LSC 350
Power: Quantum-Powerchords, Hifi-Tuning Powercord Gold w. IeGo termination, MF-Electronic power strip
USB: Monster Advanced High Speed
Rack: Lovan Classic II
Review component retail: €5.400
Some think there’s nothing new under the hifi sun. I rather feel that change has been spread wide. And that's not merely by way of real advances in affordable loudspeakers. Consider valve stalwart Audio Research. They have embraced not merely class D amplifiers but released a 100% tube-free D/A converter whose main design goal was USB which the Americans feel offers the greatest sonics of all their interface ports. Their DAC8 also dines on S/PDIF via coax and BNC, AES/EBU and Toslink with one input each. 24/192 compatibility spans the gamut. The drivers on the CD/ROM are needed only for Windows users of USB. A remote too is included though there’s no volume or variable output to have this machine replace a traditional preamp. There’s arm-chair command over input selection, mute and absolute polarity plus one function I personally find very helpful even though the manual only makes casual mention of it.
In USB mode the remote can also control an associated media player—J.River and Foobar2000 worked like a charm—with next/previous, play/pause and stop. Since either player can be set to make the current track visible on a laptop screen even from quite the distance, this neatly circumvents the need for a smartphone plus App & Co. if your needs in that sector don’t exceed the functionality of legacy CD players. With the basics covered, let’s take a closer took at the machine and also how to optimally configure media players and drivers. The DAC8’s XLR outputs aren’t mere convenience but the entire circuit is built up symmetrically inclusive the converter chips which in the DAC7 still worked in stereo mode. The 8 gets a total of four (two mono DACs per channel) which the developer claims drives down S/N over the predecessor by 3dB and improves channel separation.
Aside from the four DACs—quad converter design in ARC speak—the Americans went twins also with two master oscillators where the older DAC7 just ran one. This dedicates each clock to just one sampling-rate family—44.1 and its familiars of 88.2 and 176.4kHz; and 48/96/192kHz—to minimize math and with it decoding and quantization errors. But the user will never notice any of this. The machine automatically recognizes the incoming sample rate to switch in the proper oscillator.
The DAC8 eschews a conventional display to confirm the sample rate and selected input via glowing diodes. The USB path naturally offers user-selectable upsampling by way of after-market media players to experiment with sending the ARC deck higher sampling rates. (Mac users can achieve the same with Amarra or PureMusic for just two options). In Windows 7 users will want to deactivate ‘exclusive mode’ under system – sound – DAC8 Out 1|2. After installation of the driver, a small icon will appear in the same task bar where one usually safely removes USB sticks or external hard drives. Here one can select the desired sample rate.
A slitty-eyed glance through the top-side air vents confirms the Yanks’ foible for curves in the layout of their circuit boards. ARC finds 90° trace angles sonically and measurably inferior. "The advantages of curved circuit traces are very real. Right angles cause measurable impedance jumps, signal reflections and ultimately added jitter. Gentler directional transitions minimize jitter."
The same is claimed for the ASIO-based driver which enables asynchronous data transfer and circumvents Windows’ dreaded K-Mixer even though my laptop’s volume control remained active. The driver install also increases the otherwise 96Hz-limited ‘bore’ of USB to 192kHz. To have the media player shake seamless hands with the DAC8 driver (which installed so intuitively and is further explained in the owner’s manual to here not warrant additional comments), a few quick tips relative to Foobar200 and J.River Media Center.
With Foobar you’ll want to have pre-installed the freeware ASIO plug-in. Now you’ll pull down Preferences from the main menu, select File command to open up a new window with a hierarchical menu tree. Under Playback you’ll want to select Playback Output ASIO Virtual Devices. Confirm with OK and presto. With J.River you’ll want to go to Steering in the main menu, then select from Playback Options the Playback Mode ASIO, then DAC8 USB ASIO driver. Finish up with two OK confirmations and you’re off to the races. Which is where this review has gotten to by now.
Let’s kick off with a poor-me confession. Before I elected to professionaly review audio components and simply selected personal gear for pleasure and fun, it was sufficient to state "I like that component better than this". Nowadays I must add explanations and justifications with valid analysis and descriptions. This requires all the concentration I’m capable of. Yet beneath this discipline lives another more subtle domain whose inputs often rise up not from deliberation but when I simply sit down to get lost in the music or cue up some background ambiance during computer work.
Here loudspeakers make the whole business easier since often their differences are more tangible. Try the same clear differentiators of tonal neutrality, macrodynamics, soundstage focus or LF heft with a component like ARC’s DAC8. Now more digging is required. The DAC8 eludes easy capture by living above and beyond such standard categorizations. True, aspects which impressed right off were exemplary open and airy staging. But here I must add that with USB audio + media players and even patently more affordable DACs, I often encounter acoustic core excellence that's beyond obvious criticism and leaves rather costlier CD players in the dust.
No, the traits which turn a machine like this Audio Research into an object of desire and motivate us to smack down additional kilo euros on our dealer’s counter happen beyond acoustic core duties. That said, wiring up the ARC to my high-resolution Audionet AMP Monos and Thiel CS3.7s did surprise over what I was used to. It sounded pleasantly ‘non technical’ and ‘involving’ whilst not initially revealing just why and how. Neither did these impressions render my usual Northstar USB dac32 (steered via kernel streaming and fitted with Audio Exklusiv d.C.d footers) technical or hard to digest to make things more elusive yet. I did think it interesting that these differences with my Northstar were more pronounced over S/PDIF than USB. Where the ARC performed on the same niveau whether driven from my Fonel Simplicité player as transport or laptop, the Northstar’s performance clearly went south when I switched from USB to S/PDIF. It became less nuanced and rougher. But never mind. Let’s listen to the ARC from my J.River interfaced notebook loaded with EAC-ripped 16bit/44.1kHz WAV data.
Truth for me often surfaces when I set the New York formation Behold… The Arctopus on the track with their album Skullgrid. On it guitarist Colin Marston plays a rarely heard 12-string warr guitar and the number is an unbelievably fast virtuoso jazz/metal spectacle with limping rhythms well beyond 4:4 paths. This musically complex and not necessarily easily accessible fare became so welcoming over ARC’s DAC8 that I got stuck on this record longer than expected. "More fluid, purer and breathier than I'm used to" is how my notes put it. Individual instruments—percussion, bass and that warr guitar—were more realistic and in the positive sense calmer and less screamy. Whilst the latter term might seem curious in this context, it’s the word that spontaneously arose.
On second listen it became clearer what might have contributed to the terms "more fluid/breathier" and "purer". Individual instruments seemed defined or outlined with less edge to be surrounded with more microdynamic air. Tonal differentiation felt cleaner and more pronounced. This was particularly appreciable with this type of sonic witches brew. In this context I also felt fondly reminded of my last review subject, the Sauermann power amp which exhibited similar virtues.
These virtues were equally applicable to Swedish songstress Lykke Li who on the wonderfully ethereal/fragile "Tonight" [Youth Novels, 2008] with its compulsive refrain can appear tonally thin by veering into the glassy and hard. Though it could have been influenced my by ‘ear form’ that day since I don’t use this track regularly or for each review, I did think that over my Audionet/Thiel combo the ARC DAC8 showed the production values of this song to be less questionable; and that I could see why particular choices for its sonic design had been made in the first place. They serve the distanced but sensitive character of the song in a very particular way even if—depending on hifi ancillaries—the result can seem a bit cool and anaemic.
It was thus relevant that this didn’t happen with the DAC8. Yet this result wasn't because it was tonally warmer or guilty of even very small love handles in the midrange. No, this machine was as tonally neutral as a straight arrow, head to toe. This fact required drilling deeper to hit on any real substance required for meaningful hifi discourse. Let’s remain in Sweden but transition to Jazz. Take trumpeter Goran Kajfeš and his number "Subtropics/Kankani Boulila" from 2010’s highly commendable twofer X/Y where he teams one purely acoustic disc with one of more electronica. The right-channel melange of cymbal hits, powdered sugar decays and fluid snare work became so precisely legible that I took tacit note even without A/Bs.
To underscore this just to be sure, the same cymbalic filigree got decidedly brushed under the carpet with my otherwise highly resolved Northstar USB dac32 and Benchmark DAC1. Ditto the attacks which the DAC8 rendered grippier, more to the point and exact without introducing a shade of unpleasant analysis. It simply sounded more effortless, less rough. The ARC thus specialized in a very non-pushy and nearly mild form of high precision. That was special and honestly a first for a digital source. It thus became a very fundamental character trait of the American DAC8.
The term ‘fine pored’ was just as fitting and first suggested itself with Oneida’s "Preteen Weaponry Pt II" from the eponymous year 2008 album. Across a broad swath of frequencies here the ARC impressed with the violently distorted sound eruptions which are so important to the song’s effect. Whilst admittedly a somewhat brachial example, it nicely demonstrated or ‘visualized’ the DAC8’s particular handling of such violence which other music often maintains as a mere undercurrent. The textural wealth of many stacked small distortions that make up these primordial volcanic eruptions suggested a particularly finely pored foam image when rendered by the DAC8.
To let through the finest of fades and harmonics without subliminal grit or artefacts is arguably the great strength of this DAC which perhaps segues back to the beginning. It's after all the fingerprint of overtone finesse which is fundamental to purity of timbre and realistic tone. Have we arrived at cloudless sunshine with this Minnesotan then? As always, in matters of amplification and transducers adequate playmates are required to fully mine the extra tariff of this machine and appreciate its justification. It’s simply unlikely that any listener will get the idea to acquire a €5.000 DAC if the rest of the chain hasn’t been properly attended to.
That said I can also imagine that one or the other listener might find the taut/angular Northstar USB dac32 macrodynamically even jumpier (to precisely categorize the so very even-handed ARC with its absence of tendencies really is hard). On These New Puritans’ Hidden with its man-sized Japanese Taiko drums, the Italian captured their beats with a tad more explosive power. Returning to the ARC with pricked-up ears one could also come to the conclusion that its bass is just as fast and articulate but in keeping with the remainder of the spectrum champions a breathier microdynamically highly astute quality that’s less brutal and thus in such matters less edgy/dry and rhythmically hard.
Let’s pay the bill. To be clear, if you’re after a DAC which has no fundamental flaws to perform without pronounced personality traits, you can enter this game at a far lower price point. Particularly in this category that’s a lot easier than in the more ‘volatile’ speaker sector. I simply can’t envision identifying a machine that’s less beset with tendencies or signature imprints on the sound than this Audio Research DAC8. I mentioned earlier that even though at this juncture of the review it’d make things a lot easier, I can’t really assign this American a clear corner to stand in. It’s both a dead neutral workhorse and a pure pleasure device. Particularly nuanced listeners with transparent quality amplification and speakers will appreciate how precise and accurate yet simultaneously mild and unforced this DAC goes about its job. It’s a benchmark I’ll remember for a while…
Even though I employed the DAC8 primarily as a USB processor to keep with the focus of its design team, I was a bit surprised by just how well the S/PDIF path hung in to render the ARC anything but a specialized computer tool.
Psych profile.
The Audio Research DAC8 is characterized by:
- Neutrality and absence of tendencies in the best meaning of those terms.
- A pleasantly breathy mellow sound that surrounds individual performers with a realistic measure of air which undermines artificial outline emphasis to create exemplary plasticity instead.
- High precision and magnification power of small nuances whilst maintaining a satisfyingly soft non-pushy quality.
- A very fine-pored sonic image whose treble is free of all roughness to be immaculately stress free.
- Great non-manufactured transparency to overtones which serves not merely the already mentioned bullet points but explains why this American excels at timbral nuances.
- Brilliant microdynamics whose fluid smooth presentation also means that one or the other transient impact is rendered with less energetic propulsion than might be maximally possible. - - - Macrodynamically the DAC8 feels fundamentally fleet-footed.
Good featurization and fit ‘n’ finish which are commensurate with the price.
Facts:
- Dimensions and weight: 48 x 25.4 x 13.4cm (WxDxH), 5.2kg
- Trim: Face plate in silver or black
- Connectivity: Async USB, coax, Toslink, BNC and XLR digital in; RCA/XLR analog out
- Power consumption: 10 watts in use, 6.6 watts in standby
- Other: Asynchronous USB data processing via included drivers on CD-ROM, remote control, no volume/preamp functionality
- Warranty in Germany: 2 years
Jorg Dames
Source
