dCS Bartók
The Vivaldi—the four-box flagship product from digital audio specialists dCS—is, in my opinion, misnamed. Vivaldi the composer was an asthmatic priest who worked in an orphanage for 30 years and died in poverty. The Vivaldi stack dedicates four separate products to converting into music digital code stored on silver discs (although you can play music—very well I am sure—on just one box, the Vivaldi DAC). 1 Together, those boxes weigh about 148lb and cost some $115,000. The most expensive is the CD/SACD transport; leave that off and you can save 51lb and $42,000.
So why not choose a grander composer to name the flagship after? I know: dCS has already produced a Verdi, and a Verdi La Scala—now there’s grandeur—and to call it Beethoven would seem presumptuous. Still, why not call it the Brahms?
The Modernist
The dCS Bartók is named as perfectly as the Vivaldi is named imperfectly. Like the 20th-century Hungarian composer, dCS’s newest DAC embodies a modernist sensibility. It isn’t especially small or light, but neither is it large and ostentatious. It occupies a single box—attractive and angular in the spirit of, say, Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. It weighs 36.8lb—pretty typical for a full-sized DAC—takes up far less space than the Vivaldi stack, and costs $15,000 for the version with a headphone amp; the headphoneless version costs $1500 less.
Compared to the Vivaldi stack, the Bartók is unassuming. When composer Béla Bartók died of leukemia in a New York hospital, quite close to where I now sit writing, only 10 people attended the funeral—this just a couple of years after writing his most famous work, the Concerto for Orchestra.
But Bartók was an eminent composer, and this sophisticated, modest-looking box is itself clearly aimed at greatness. Despite being stuffed in a single box—perhaps an oppressive experience for the components inside, since dCS components are accustomed to having plenty of space to stretch out—the Bartók is also full-featured, with a volume control, that headphone amplifier, and an inside-the-case version of the company’s Network Bridge. That last one allows the Bartók to render into music audio data received via an RJ45 (Ethernet) network connection, delivered
