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Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter

Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter

I first met Light Harmonic’s chief designer Larry Ho in Atlanta at the AXPONA show, back in 2011. Of all the nifty bits I ran across that day, a few stood out, but the most striking was clearly his Darth Vader DAC.

Maybe it didn’t really look like Darth Vader. Maybe it just evoked the Dark Lord of the Sith. But you take my point—it was a striking design.

He laughed at me when I mentioned Lord Vader, and quickly pointed out why his brand-new DAC, which he was calling Da Vinci and not Darth Vader (for copyright reasons probably), had that angular chic: I was looking at two distinct chassis, stacked in such a way that they could save space, eliminate the extra circuitry and external cabling that a separate chassis required, and still reap all the benefits that physical separation grants. All I heard was “it rotates,” and I think I spent far too many minutes slowly pivoting the chassis top, which houses all the delicate conversion circuitry, back and forth over the power supply that sits in the lower box. You’ll forgive me (and hopefully Larry will too) when I tell you that you really ought to try this out at the next audio show. It’s a remarkable bit of machining, and the slip-snick as the top rotates is a bit akin to fondling the bezel of a Rolex. Slip-snick. Slip-snick. Slip-snick…I think I might have hypnotized myself a little bit there. Anyway, the Da Vinci definitely made an impression but it would be another two years before I got the chance to get up-close and personal.

Just so you know, the Da Vinci will play all of the standard, run-of-the-mill lossy and lossless computer audio files like WAV, FLAC, and AIFF at all the standard sampling rates, including 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.4kHz, and 192kHz, across all inputs, which include a single USB-B interface, as well as AES/EBU and SPDIF. In a bit of foreshadowing, it’s the USB input that gets a bit of a bonus—the sampling there can also accept 352.8kHz and 384kHz files. And that, my friends, is pretty cool.

At $20,000, the Da Vinci sits at the bottom of the ladder of Light Harmonic’s scale. Sort of (we’ll get back to that). One level up sits the DaVinci Dual DAC, an externally-identical box that adds the ability to decode DSD and double-DSD files along a completely separated and isolated path, which is the only way that the Light Harmonic team felt that DSD could be implemented without seriously compromising the sound. Two DACs, two paths, one chassis, $31,000. And at the very top of the heap? The just-announced Sire DAC, at $120,000, will compete with the very best on offer, and represents Light Harmonic’s full-out, no-holds-barred assault on the high end.

Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter

An intimidating ladder, I’ll admit it.

But for those of you prone to skipping ahead, let me completely spoil the surprise. The Da Vinci DAC is the best all-around performer I’ve yet heard. It isn’t inexpensive and its looks will raise eyebrows, but the sound it’s capable of weaving is the most comprehensively compelling I’ve yet heard out of my home system. Full stop. Done.

Listening to Da Vinci
So, let’s be different and start squarely in the middle, with this: What do you listen for when auditioning a DAC?

Me, I tend to look for a couple of things. Maybe not first on the list, but somewhere near might be whether there’s a sense of depth. A lack here covers a variety of sins—clarity and detail, for examples. When I’m truly happy with a DAC, it’s usually due to the sense that I can hear “more deeply” into a recording. Playback that’s two-dimensional, with a soundstage that’s abbreviated in any number of ways, is fairly common, and leaves me feeling like I’m peering through a window. This is something that’s easy to get used to rather quickly, but a component can make that view more or less immersive, more or less immediate. This is where I start thinking about “veils” and whether or not they’ve been added or removed. Now, once in a great while, so many of these obstructions get removed that the hyperbolic in me tends to reach for something overblown. Like, say, imagining that the system has suddenly taken a sledgehammer to the window, removing it entirely, and providing something more direct in the way of a personal experience. Sometimes, hyperbole is really the only way to get across the fact that something is different. Really different. I guess it won’t come as a shock that I’m going to paint the Da Vinci as one of those things.

Take an excellent recording, like the shockingly clean Stockfish release of Chris Jones’ Roadhouses and Automobiles. I use the title track not for the music anymore because, quite frankly, I’ve played it so many times it makes my skin crawl, but instead for some of the sonic trickery embedded in the mix. To wit, there be bugs. Played back on a resolving system, you can quite distinctly hear crickets in the opening and closing sequences on the first track. I have no idea why, but they’re there. I’ve heard this odd bit of detail through many systems (and not heard it through more), and I’ve used it for a while now as a first-level barometer of how well a system can resolve detail in the soundstage. So, I ask: “Does the [insert component here] pass ‘The Cricket Test’?”

 

With the Da Vinci, I found myself seated on my front porch at dusk, with the little buggers just swarming the soundstage. Interesting bit? It wasn’t just the opener that was infested—it was the entire track. Every transition. Every change-up. Somebody clearly needed to call an exterminator. You can imagine me leaning abruptly forward in my listening chair, a studied look of snobbish boredom suddenly broken by a creased frown, darting eyes, and a stabbing jab at the replay button on the remote. That. Was. New. Cool!

Or rather, it wasn’t. That sort of thing is always there; it’s just whether or not you can get to it. Noise is a tricky thing, a great mask, but it’s also one of those things—like that window—that’s really only obvious when it’s gone. Now, “black backgrounds” are about as cliché as you can get in high-end audio, and talking about them without sounding like a random-phrase generator that habitually spits out the word “inky” is apparently quite difficult. It’s hard to know what the term actually means, especially out of context—silence is silence, after all. Which made the surprise visit from Inky Blackerstein and his Complete Ensemble of Deep-Space Emptiness such an unexpected and completely revelatory treat. Apparently, I’d never been formally introduced, but be assured that he’s quite a fine fellow to have over for a listening session. Anyway, what all this meant was a spill from The Cornucopia of 3-D Information pretty much all over my listening room.

Todd Garfinkle’s excellent MA Recordings label, for example, is a marvelous way to explore these kinds of experiences. Todd is a “recording artist”—that is, he creates recordings in a downright artistic way. The idea of capturing music in “living spaces” is probably not new or unique, but it most definitely is unusual. La Segunda is the second outing for Sera Una Nocha, an eclectic group of musicians pulled together by Todd and his partner to play some equally eclectic music. This particular recording was made in a small monastery in the Argentinean countryside with only a pair of omnidirectional microphones, and the venue is the cradle that holds the haunting and delicate work. Played back at 24-bit resolution and 176kHz sampling, the sound is wildly open and airy. Playback shows the players clearly arrayed in a semicircle around the microphones, and the specificity of their placement is utterly transparent. Interestingly, Todd told me that the percussionists were actually sitting behind the mics; translation into my two-channel system places them behind the vocalist. It’s a fascinating effect and is especially clear with the Da Vinci, and another something I hadn’t noticed before. Again, neat.

Okay, after detail and depth, I tend to look for bass “authority.” For whatever reason, my experience with high-res-capable DACs has been dominated by a sense of litheness in the presentation. It’s as if the tonal balance is anchored a bit high. A great deal of listener attention gets focused on sonic aspects like “air” and “detail,” which is generally a rather pleasing effect, but doesn’t necessarily mean baby’s got back. So, I reached for another track from Chris Jones’ Roadhouses and Automobiles. “No Sanctuary Here” enjoyed a year or two as the Most Overplayed Song At An Audio Show, due in no small part to the ominousness of the bass track. It is, in a word, Big. Like, that’s-a-thunderstorm-and-we’re-never-going-to-reach-shelter-in-time Big. Played back on big speakers in a big room it’ll shake the walls and everything between, which is probably why it was so popular—it’ll stop show traffic out in the hallway, for sure. Anyway, I’ve found that many supposedly full-range loudspeakers don’t handle the track with equal aplomb, so I like to use it when Looking For Mr. Big Bass. What I’m listening for is a deep, satisfying sense of harmonic rightness, of pitch definition, of… okay, you know what I really want? It’s fear, plain and simple. If the sound doesn’t make me dive for the floor screeching “holy crap,” it isn’t right. It’s also not enough to sketch that tone, I want speed, precision, and decay, but perhaps most importantly, I want fullness and continuity, and they are rare. So, assuming the speakers can go there, the question is, will this DAC Thelma-and-Louise me right off the cliff and into an audio abyss, or will there be some kind of last second slide just short of the danger zone? The Berkeley Audio Alpha DAC does this zone particularly well, and quite frankly, it was the reason I bought it. The Da Vinci also gets this particular aspect “right,” but with a slightly different take. Namely, there’s the sense that there’s nothing to catch you as you dive off the background into forever. Thank you, Inky.

Tracking bass speed and PRAT took me to Jem’s Finally Woken and “Come On Closer.” A sexy track, this, where the bass line is front-and-center and climbs and dives throughout the tune. Another one for testing the limits of a loudspeaker or setup, it’s a matter of continuity and roundness to the notes as they drop like cannonballs onto a suddenly trampoline-like soundstage. With the backdrop the Da Vinci knitted out of the void, tracking the bass was an athletic exercise, arresting and explosive and altogether addicting.

Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter

Reference Recordings has a reputation for great recordings, and the Minnesota Orchestra’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances is dynamic and complex in just the right way to short-sheet a digital converter. I’ve heard this piece quite a lot in 24-bit/176kHz high-resolution PCM; it’s included on the HRx Sampler that’s available from Reference Recordings that came with the Berkeley DAC. The piece begins softly; the temptation will be to crank it up early, which makes the crescendos even more entertaining, the sudden climbs so stark and unexpected that my dog fled in a mixture of terror and outrage and led to another argument with my wife over “proper listening levels” and whether or not I’d be allowed to have the remote back. Whoops. But the Deep Space Da Vinci’s backdrop sets a really involving stage and tensions mounted swiftly as the woodwinds and strings began to struggle with each other, battling for supremacy, instead of battling for audibility. And even with the lightning crash of cymbals and the thunderbolt of the timpani, you had depth, placement, and delineation. This is the most coherent rendition I’ve heard of this piece, and played back at appropriate volume (i.e., loud), even a diehard classical skeptic (that would be me) was thrilled.

Note to self: Play demos when the kids are in school not when they’re in bed.

There are those who would call the Da Vinci “very analog.” I’m not sure I’m one of them, as Great Big Bass on a vinyl system is even more problematic than it is for a DAC. So, no, the Da Vinci is not analog-like. It’s better than that. But, that said, there’s an ease to the sound that is entirely non-fatiguing. Not to say that it’s in any way treble-challenged, but tracks do not tend to go brittle when bad—bad recordings stay that way, which is to say, Adele’s 21 still sounds horribly compressed, even with the Da Vinci’s Duet Engine sorting it out (more below). But what I mean is that it doesn’t sound worse. Some DACs, when fed crap, tend to either smooth out the hard edges or use them as an excuse to start swinging bags of broken glass at your ears. The Da Vinci does neither—compression sounds like what it is, which is “a horrible tragedy.” Here, vinyl tends to do better, as whatever travesties usually visited on a recording destined for silver discs and/or iTunes tend to not be visited on the vinyl version.

Again and again, I was tempted and taunted about the volume—a little voice kept saying, “Maybe you should turn it up.” My wife loved that part. Ahem. But the grain-free view on the music was as transparent as I’ve been able to achieve at home, and that view was fully as three-dimensional as the source material allowed. I can’t be faulted for throwing myself headfirst into such waters, now can I? Volume restrictions be damned! Ha HA!

Tonally, I found the Da Vinci to have a balanced presentation as no particular part of the sonic tapestry stands out. The bass is exemplary, and there is no tonal shift upward or downward that would mark the designer as overly celebrating some favored portion of the audio band. On the whole, the DAC’s presentation is unremarkably excellent and nothing feels out of place; it’s all of a piece. Organic. Which makes isolating its signature something of a nightmare, but there it is.

I’d say that it was, in a word, musical, but I’m pretty sure that’s another one of those damned clichés, so let’s just settle on “awesome.”

 

Technical Bits
This DAC is almost annoyingly stuffed full of audio wizardry, but one thing you won’t find is any digital upsampling or oversampling. Why not? Well, it’s simple: Light Harmonic couldn’t get that kind of design to come close enough to the sound of an analog front end. Bit-perfect protection and preservation led the company to a shunt-regulated resistor-ladder architecture, but the secret sauce might well be the patent-pending three-layer buffering system that feeds the bits into the converting architecture in the most jitter-free manner possible. Aiding this are three clocks, one for 44.1kHz (and multiples) and one for 48kHz (and multiples), and also one 13MHz clock dedicated to the USB input.

With 64-bits in the volume-control architecture, the inevitable degradation that bit-tossing will introduce is reserved for far lower on “the dial”—and I put that in quotes because while adjusting volume is simple, getting to the volume control isn’t. Since the remote that comes with the Da Vinci has no volume buttons, you’re going to need a second one—for the computer. That is, the volume is modified entirely and only from the computer that’s attached to the Da Vinci; it’s your player’s software that sends the attenuation signal to the DAC (assuming your software supports volume control, but most iTunes add-ons like Audirvana do), and the DAC then handles the actual volume level.

A couple of other things: the Da Vinci does two things worth calling out. First is the least significant bit (LSB) correction. Without getting overly technical, it’s this modification to the attenuation algorithms that allows the digital volume control to achieve an unexpectedly high level of performance. I’ll say more about this in a moment, but at the risk of sidelining the review in favor of a treatise on the Promises and Pitfalls of Digital Attenuation, it’s good to know the LH team is aware of the fact that “simple” isn’t necessarily “better” in this sphere.

Speaking of digital manipulation, there’s the Duet Engine. The Web site describes this as a way to improve on the sound of “regular resolution” CD-quality audio files without upsampling or oversampling. Um, yeah. I had to ask about this. What happens is “time-aligned analog interpolation”; with parallel output modules, Light Harmonic is able to take the signals from each and perform operations on them that yield a more accurate result. Since there are two modules, this in effect doubles the sample rate. Clever. In practice, I found that the improvement was subtle but pleasing, with an unusual transparency that was surprisingly non-fatiguing.

And that’s the digital bits.

Light Harmonic Da Vinci Digital-to-Analog Converter

Now, if I had to categorize what it was that worries me most about DACs in general, it has nothing to do with the actual conversion. Sure, there are good and better ways to do that, and acceptable-to-bad ways of feeding those chipsets. My feeling is that these problems tend to be pretty well understood. Where most DAC designers tend to take naps is on the analog output. Here’s another place where the Da Vinci steps up.

The design is a zero-feedback architecture and if this sounds like an amplifier, then I probably won’t put you off when I say that the design is fully dual-mono, fully balanced, using JFETs with an output buffer, and there are no op-amps anywhere. The Da Vinci has both single-ended/RCA and balanced/XLR outputs, with 2.05V output on the SE outs and double that on the balanced. More specs: With better than -125dB residual noise across the audible band and -142dB of crosstalk, the whole Blackety-Blackblack and the Great Empty Nothing make sense.

Then there are three beefy R-core transformers. It’s an unusual design choice, but with separated windings it’s also one that minimizes noise. And there are 40 different regulators deployed across the architecture, from the input all the way down to the DAC chipset itself, including regulators for both the USB input and the individual clocks.

Worth Noting
Did I mention that the Da Vinci has an odd shape? That’s called understatement. Anyway, the look of this DAC is going to be polarizing. It’s not ugly by any means, but with the angles and softly glowing racing stripe that traces across the edge of the top chassis, well, it’s…eclectic. That look is a long, expensive way to go to make a Sci-Fi reference, but as I mentioned, the design choice has a purpose. The housing is actually two distinct chassis, one mounted directly on top of each other, and coupled with a rotating hinge. Yes, a hinge. The top “box,” when ready for use, will sit at a 45° angle to the lower one. I suppose this could be another reference to the where the name Da Vinci came from. The Vitruvian Man is that line drawing by Da Vinci of the longhaired naked man superimposed over himself showing two different arm and leg positions while drawn inside a square and a circle (makes sense, but I still prefer the image of Vader’s meditation chamber). Everything has a purpose, an optimal shape, is part of a well-conceived plan.

While technologically something of a marvel, the design choice means that getting to the cable inputs/outputs is a problem—I had to lift the chassis up to get at that tiny rear-mounted panel, and once exposed, it’s clear that the cables are a bit crowded in there. Tilting a 60-pound chassis around with your fingertips is going to be problematic, so do yourself a favor and give yourself some room before having at it, or better still, connect everything before getting it settled into your rack.

A note about the footers: There aren’t any attached, but there are two sets that came with my unit that you can rest the narrow bottom of the DAC on. I started out with none, simply resting the flat bottom directly on my rack’s platform, but fiddling clearly showed that there’s a positive difference with the feet instead of without. Pick one of the two supplied, or, as the Light Harmonic team suggests, find an aftermarket set that tickles your fancy.

 

About the USB cable. There isn’t one that ships with the DAC, but you’re obviously going to need one to use that input. I’m going to wave my hands at the “how can a USB cable make a difference” argument and simply state that it does and that the optional LightSpeed USB cable that Light Harmonic offers is the best I’ve heard. No, the differences are not huge, but this one is reliably good and full-frequency. There are two versions, one with the “client-side” connectors (USB-A) separated (power from signal) and one with them joined. I tried them both, and for my setup I found the separated-connector version to be preferable, though the difference was extremely subtle.

The Da Vinci has several digital inputs, USB, SPDIF and AES/EBU. I tried all three—especially that AES connector, as that’s what I use with my Berkeley Alpha DAC by way of the truly excellent Alpha USB-to AES/EBU converter. I’ve used that converter with every DAC that allows me to do so, and without fail, its addition dramatically improves the performance of every DAC I’ve attached it to. Tighter bass, airier highs, cleaner detail— the gains are almost always across the board.

Well, that was true until I used the Berkeley converter with the Da Vinci. Very clearly, the Da Vinci is to be used with the USB input. Yes, you can use whatever input you like, but the USB input is different. It uses the now-standard asynchronous mode, courtesy of the XMOS receiver chipset, and all the extra-special buffering and filtering is done on that interface, so bypassing it in favor of a “legacy” input is going to be a mistake, in my opinion. Better still, the on-board volume control options are restricted to the USB input, so if you have any curiosity at all about running this DAC directly into your amps, you’re stuck with the USB input anyway. It should be obvious, but as a safety precaution let me note that if you do set this up to run amp-direct from any signal sourced from the other inputs, the resulting volume will be at full scale (i.e., insanely loud).

Another curiosity has more to do with form driving function: Given that the shape just has to be this particular shape to meet the design goal of a non-resonant chassis that minimizes internal reflections also means that the readout/display is cocked upwards at a 45-degree angle, and unfortunately, it’s not a fancy-shmancy highly-visible OLED display like you’d find on the AURALiC Vega. If the DAC sits on the top of your three-shelf rack in order to show its sexy self off, you’re not going to be able to read the display from anything resembling a listening position. I solved this quite straightforwardly by placing the Da Vinci on the lowest shelf I had, and ta da! Done. This also gave me the side benefit of being able to use the included remote. Not that I really needed the remote. It doesn’t actually control the volume; other than muting, it’s really only for engaging features, and once you’ve set them you can pretty much put the remote back in the hulking Pelican crate everything came in.

Last bit on the amp-direct thing. I used the DAC in quite a few different setups, including without a preamp into both a single-ended tube amplifier from BorderPatrol and into balanced solid-state amplifiers from Vitus Audio, Pass Labs, and others. In general my systems tend to sound more transparent with no preamplifier, but I’m going to hesitate before universally and unequivocally calling that “better.” To be fair, I suppose it depends entirely on the preamplifier. I found that the DAC-only sound tended to be more open, with a larger soundstage and higher level of detail retrieval, than what I could manage with an external passive preamplifier, but with a very high-quality active preamp, the presentation could be more robust and muscular, with little degradation in the soundstage (and, perhaps, an even more extended, precise one). Where things got really interesting was in the evening, when un-restricted dynamics invoked wrath. Here, the Da Vinci-as-preamp excelled—detail, dynamics, and soundstage all maintained their characteristically high levels of performance even as I accommodated the schedules of my Little People, and did so well past the points I was able to achieve with my other two DAC references.

What I’m hinting at is that the amp-direct thing is most definitely worth exploring. If you’re like me and have an analog source that you have absolutely no intention of foregoing, then this is all moot, but if you’re looking to simplify with an all-digital setup (and assuming that the amplifier has enough gain), chances are that the Da Vinci, with a rather low 12 ohms output impedance and a 2-or 4-volt output, will likely not only drive your system fully and expertly, but could revolutionize it entirely.

A Question of Value
In a world of wildly escalating pricing and irrelevancy to anything resembling the “common consumer,” another $20,000 product isn’t terribly exciting. The problem with all this, as I see it, is a belief that audiophiles are only interested if products are at or beyond a certain price point, and titillating anecdotes aside, this is just crazy talk and may well be the leading cause of the decline of the industry as a whole. On the other hand, the high-end-audio industry is also the only one I know of that routinely prices and sells design concepts as if they were regular products. It’s as if Ford’s latest thinking about the future of automobiles, a design it called “Concept Future” and showed at the Detroit Auto Show, suddenly got a sticker price and an order queue. These cars aren’t meant to be daily-drivers (or even driven, in many cases), they’re just ideas that the company tests out to see what reaction they evoke. But in high-end audio, that’s exactly what happens with the “concept” components—they’re priced and positioned for sale, if only to the super-high-roller. Of course, there’s little to no expectation that these concepts will move a ton of volume, but as test-beds of nifty engineering or shiny design ideas, they’re superb. Case in point is what Light Harmonic has done with the Da Vinci. This DAC wasn’t conceived of as a built-to-a-price-point product. It was commercialized (eventually) in that it is currently priced in such a way as to make profit for the company, but it really started as Larry Ho’s statement of vision. The finished result told him many things about what a DAC platform can do, and that education led him to the 100-times-less-expensive Geek Out USB dongle—a soon-to-be-released DXD/double-DSD-capable headphone DAC/amplifier. It also told him things that his original design could not do, and that is leading to the 6-times more expensive Sire DAC.

The best a reviewer can hope for is to measure a product against his own references, for one, and to measure the product against the designer’s goals, for another. For me, the Da Vinci is clearly, unambiguously, and obviously superior to my personal references. At the risk of putting words in Larry’s mouth, I can still recall the giddy grin he wore the first time I met him, way back. He’s so obviously proud of what he’s put together that seeing his concepts made so stunningly, menacingly real has got to be a win. Of course, now that the Sire has been announced, I do wonder what it is he thinks he can do to top Da Vinci.

Anyway, if you want to take that as a measure of value, then so be it. But I won’t ever be able to tell you if the Da Vinci is “worth it” without a tediously detailed reference to my own, very personal calculus, and even if I could articulate that for you, the chances of it being meaningfully comprehended are slim. All I can offer is this: The Da Vinci DAC is an outstanding performer and I absolutely loved using it. When it left, it caused physical pain and a significant period of psychological withdrawal. I am still unhappy it is not here. And adding insult to injury, the Lotto Fairy is still not taking my calls.

Twenty-thousand dollars is a ton of dough. And that is for a product that has already been leapfrogged by the industry. DSD, like it or lump it, is the latest and stickiest buzzword, and any DAC that doesn’t support it requires significant justification. The Da Vinci does not support DSD and will not. Which may be a problem. Of course, it may not be, and I know that many of my colleagues are adamant that the format is as irrelevant as SACD was—and for exactly the same reasons. Me? I’m agnostic. I have several hundred DSD albums, but admittedly I’m weird. If you do not see yourself as ever needing or wanting to explore that format, then awesome.

The Da Vinci, then, occupies that rarest of the rare when it comes to high-end audio—the Exit Ramp. It may be that there is better, or more refined, or whatever, when it comes to digital-to-analog conversion, but I’m really not sure I’d bother as beyond this point on the price/performance curve jumps become so incremental that value becomes an entirely alien notion. For me, the Da Vinci marks new territory and is my new high-water mark for what can be done, at least with non-DSD source material. In short, I’ve never heard better. Very highly recommended.

SPECS & PRICING

Converter type: R-2R architecture with patentpending 3-layer buffer
Output levels: 2.05V unbalanced; 4.1V balanced
Digital inputs: One asynchronous USB 2.0 interface on standard USB-B connectors (will accept up to 32-bit PCM at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192, 352.8, 384K S/s); one asynchronous AES / EBU on XLR connector (will accept up to 24-bit PCM at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192kHz); one asynchronous SPDIF on one RCA phono connectors (will accept up to 24-bit PCM at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192kHz)
Balanced outputs: One stereo pair on XLR connector
Unbalanced outputs: One stereo pair on RCA connector
THD +N (unweighted): Better than 0.0018%
Residual noise (unweighted): Better than –115dB @ 20Hz–20kHz
Residual noise (A-weighted): Better than –125dB @ 20Hz–20kHz
Crosstalk: -142dBFS @ 10kHz
Dimensions: 18.5″ x 7.87″ x 18.5″
Weight: 61 lbs.
Price: $20,000

Light Harmonic, LLC
3050 Fite Circle, Suite 112
Sacramento, CA 95827
(888) 842-5988

Associated Equipment

TIDAL Audio Contriva Diacera SE loudspeakers; Soulution 530 integrated amplifier; Vitus Audio RS-100 stereo amplifier; Vitus Audio RD-100 DAC/preamplifier; Pass Laboratories XA-100.5 monoblock amplifiers; Pass Laboratories XP-30 preamplifier; Berkeley Audio Design Alpha DAC and Alpha USB converter; Purist Audio Design’s Corvus Line cables and interconnects; Shunyata Hydra Triton power conditioner; isolation products from Symposium AV; DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/96 loudspeakers; BorderPatrol S10 EXD SET stereo amplifier; BorderPatrol Control Unit EXD preamplifier; Auralic VEGA DAC; signal cables from MG Audio Design; power cables from Triode Wire Labs; Silver Circle Tchaik 6 power conditioner; isolation products from Symposium AV; MacBook Pro used as a media server, configured with Audirvana; media files on external FireWire 800 hard drive

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