Weiss DAC204 - D/A PROCESSOR

Weiss Engineering D/A processors are widely known for their high quality, in both home audio and pro-audio circles.

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Over several Stereophile reviews, they have always measured well. Oh, and did you know they'd won a Grammy Award? Weiss Engineering founder and chief designer Daniel Weiss won the 2021 Grammy Award for Technical Merit for his pioneering work during the '80s and '90s designing digital equipment for mastering studios. Daniel is in good company: Another winner of the same award is Thomas Edison-though, unlike Daniel, Edison won it long after he was dead.

Daniel is one of those audio people that Herb Reichert would call a Wizard. He took part in the digital revolution just as it was taking off, at the tail end of the 1970s, and has focused his whole life on it ever since.

"I worked there between 1979 and 1984," Daniel told me during our interview. "There" was the Swiss company Studer. "Studer started doing digital audio in 1979 and to that end opened a new lab, just for digital audio. There, I worked on analog reconstruction filters for D/A converters, on digital testing generators, on the SFC16 universal sampling frequency converter and audio interface, and on digital signal processing for the first DASH tape recorder we built."¹ While he was there, Daniel received a fateful visit from German mastering engineer Ben Bernfeld, he recounted.

"Ben wanted to have an interface between two Sony digital audio recorders, but Studer did not do such custom work, so I did that interface in my spare time. It turned out there was a huge gap in the market in digital audio equipment for CD mastering. The CD was very young back then, and the mastering engineers, who do the last treatment to a recording before it gets published, were using analog equipment for those digital recordings, meaning they had to apply D/A and A/D conversion to do that. They did this with converters that at the time were compromised in terms of sound quality.