Gold Note DS-10
I felt like I’d just been offered a choice of 31 flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream topped with up to 57 varieties of Heinz ketchup, 57 condiments, and 47 brands of coddled cream. My head began to spin, my stomach churned, and my mouth grew very dry as I read that Gold Note’s DS-10 ($2995) was a “chameleon DAC” with 192 setup options that enable it to “completely blend in with different music genres, giving the listener the opportunity to adapt the behavior of the unit to the music playing, to one’s stereo system and, most of all, to the listener’s taste.”
My brain was rattled by memories of Michael Green Designs Chameleon tunable speakers and the frightening number of hours I had devoted to trying to get them to sound “right.” I flashed back to the afternoon in my East Oakland living room when I was so convinced that everything was perfect that I had invited my friend Danaan over for a visit. That’s when I indulged in one of my friend’s joints—something I never do when reviewing equipment because it affects my hearing.
Gold Note’s little combo sounded fantastic for a package that costs less than an eighth of what the dCS duo costs.
“Something’s wrong with the tuning,” cried the delusional one (me). Much to Danaan’s chagrin—he was a practitioner of vibrational medicine, and my vibes had just shot into critical diagnosis zone—I grabbed the tuning control and began to alter speaker settings far too much. After the fiasco ended rather abruptly—how could anyone possibly groove to music as this wide-eyed mad person was radically altering tonal balance, soundstage width, and bass while babbling hysterically?—my friend gave up and left. Hours later, after I had returned to a “normal-for-me” level of audiophilia nervosa, I took one listen to the mess I’d made and vowed that I would rather sell those speakers than engage in one more round of tuning.
Here I was again, but this time it was a compact, multifunction D/A processor that threatened to metamorphose my delight into delirium. I resolved arbitrarily to set the DAC’s three presets, each with multiple choices of equalization curve, de-emphasis curve, and power setting, all on 1, all in the middle, and all at max, respectively. I then took a brief listen, scribbled in my notes “the higher the three settings go in tandem, the warmer and fatter the sound,” and decided that was as far as I would go. Dismiss me, fire me, shoot me if you must, but I swore I’d
