New Bytes in Old Bottles
Every time I review a digital-to-analog converter, my memory drifts to the spring of 1983, when the first Compact Discs arrived at Tower Records in New York City. They appeared in the opera section. Sitting next to big, thick boxed sets of opera LPs, these new discs looked truly compact. A few months later, boxed sets of popular opera LPs, in almost untouched condition, began selling in the Tower Annex for $1/disc.
I was shocked. I could not believe people were actually trading these luxurious, linen-covered, rag-papered, thick-librettoed boxes for chintzy, verkakte plastic “jewel cases.” I saw no alternative: I began collecting opera LPs.
As the jewel-cased pestilence morphed into a pandemic, I acquiesced, and out of pure curiosity bought a portable Sony Discman CD player. My little Discman played music with a slightly wet muzzle, but it was mostly okay. It encouraged me to buy more CDs—and more $1 LPs.
1987: I remember when Theta Digital’s DS Pro digital-to-analog converter arrived at Manhattan high-end dealer Sound by Singer. It generated lots of reviews, conversations, and sales. Overnight, DACs became a new audio-component category. Like specialty cables and separate phono stages before them, DACs looked to be around for a while. What a great idea, I thought—they’re making separates out of digital. Around the same time, Arcam introduced their Delta Black Box DAC, which used a TDA1541A chip, and PS Audio introduced its Digital Link DAC, which used an 18-bit Burr-Brown PCM-61P chip.
My scattered auditions of early CD players by Philips-Magnavox and Sony suggested that the chief problem with the new format was that engineers, manufacturers, and audiophiles had zero idea how digital was to sound. Digital vanquished LP surface noise, and its proponents saw that
