CH Precision C1.2

D/A PROCESSOR

- JIM AUSTIN

If you’re reasonably handy, you can probably build your own digital-to-analog converter. It won’t cost much, and if you’re careful, and knowledgeable enough to understand and follow some rather technical instructions, or if you have patience enough to follow advice from a few different online discussion forums—and the judgment to distinguish the good advice from the bad—then the DAC you make may end up sounding very good.

So it’s no surprise that you can buy very good Chinese-made DACs that measure very well, very cheaply. Those Chinese DACs are probably designed by first-rate engineers, and while extracting maximum technical performance from a good DAC chip requires care and attention, it isn’t rocket science.1

What, then, is the point in paying tens of thousands of dollars for a D/A converter?

It’s a reasonable question, one that every DAC shopper must answer for themselves. Is extremely low measured jitter, noise, and distortion all that matters in a DAC? Is it sufficient assurance that it will sound “perfect,” as good as a DAC can sound? Or is it possible to take this basic technology further, despite what the measurements show? It’s easy enough to find people who are quite happy with their $1k DAC and smugly confident that they’re getting the best possible sound. But in perfectionist audio (and certainly in this magazine), it’s axiomatic that progress is always possible, that you can