No one knows where the ladder goes
I am fascinated by DACs and the shifting sands of today’s digital-audio marketplace. This month, I am reporting on two more DACs, both made by Denafrips: the $4498 Terminator, until recently their flagship DAC, and the $768 Ares II, the company’s least expensive model. Like the HoloAudio May DAC I described last month, both Denafrips converters employ R-2R conversion schemes, and both render recordings into direct, unprocessed sound.
The Denafrips Terminator is not new. It has been around since March 2017 and has been reviewed and discussed (but not in Stereophile). When I checked, Stereophile’s Recommended Components listed a baker’s dozen sigma-delta DACs, five of which use the same ESS9038Pro chip; two use the ESS9028 chip. Five others employ FPGAs. Inexplicably, there was not a single R-2R ladder DAC. Especially glaring was the absence of popular audiophile brands like AudioNote, Lampizator, Totaldac, Aqua, Audio GD, HoloAudio, and Denafrips—all of which specialize in ladder DACs. (MSB does, too, but they say theirs aren’t R-2R.) In my usual Herbbeing-Herb-the-contrarian way, I have taken it upon myself to correct these omissions.
I like reviewing DACs
When I review DACs, I feel especially close to my readers. I mean, we all have a DAC, right? I assume also that most of you stream music from somewhere: Tidal or Qobuz or Spotify or Amazon HD or Apple Music. When I describe how a track sounds on my system, you can try it on yours. This is important because in these Denafrips explorations, I am going to be more specific than usual about what I am listening for and how I assess today’s digital products by their ability to recover all the ambient and reverberant information stored in recordings.
All nonanechoic spaces pulse with audible reverberant energy. The complex time and phase relationships of these interacting reverberations are what we use to locate ourselves.
