BRICASTI DESIGN
“It’s not like, OK which one is better? They all have their character, because they are different products and have different treatments. I want them to be different.”
The last time we interviewed Brian Zolner, the ‘Bri’ in Bricasti Design, we learned a good deal, and were especially taken with his explanation of why hardly any digital DSD recordings are really truly DSD, and why most of the few that are, aren’t worth having. This time we interviewed Brian Zolner during the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show, where Bricasti was showing its new M21 and its recent M5 in the suite of its distributor, Studio Connections Australia.
To briefly recap the story so far, Bricasti Design was formed by two former employees of Lexicon, joined subsequently by engineers from Madrigal Laboratories. The company’s first product was for the professional market, the M7 reverb unit. But it was the first consumer product, the M1 DAC, which brought Bricasti to the attention of audiophiles on the street. It straddled both pro and high-end consumer camps with its generous connecting options and solid build quality, and won praise especially for the results of its builtfrom-first-principles digital engineering, notably in using Bricasti’s own reconstruction filters rather than adopting one of the popular DAC chips.
The result was an ongoing stream of panegyric reviews for the M1 from the hi-fi press, including a DAC of the Year award from our own team at Sound+Image, followed by more for the M28 monobloc power amplifier, which along with an M15 stereo integrated amp and the M12 source controller, allowed Bricasti to offer a complete system solution. It also introduced a shiny chromestyle finish for what is called the Platinum Series, currently limited to the M12 source controller and the new M21.
The smaller M5 came next, this being a network player with digital but not analogue outputs, so a DAC is still required. And debuting at the Show was the M21, which is listed by Bricasti as another stereo DAC, same as
