CH Precision D1.5

There’s a school of thought that maintains that among all hi-fi components, the D/A converter is easiest to perfect or come close to perfecting. Just make sure that every sample is converted accurately, that there’s little rolloff in the audioband, that aliased images are suppressed almost completely, and that background noise is extremely low, and you have a top-quality D/A processor. Use of a high-quality DAC chip is assumed.

The transport part of the player is even easier to nail, this thinking goes, because all it needs to do is extract the data accurately, something any box-store CD player can do. Jitter? No need to worry about that, or anything happening in the time domain, as long as the data are transferred to a decent DAC via an asynchronous isochronous interface and reclocked inside the converter. Reclocking salves all digital wounds, or so this thinking goes.

What’s especially reassuring to like-minded audiophiles is that all this can be verified with a simple set of measurements that almost anyone can do; all you need is some affordable software and a $150 USB computer interface—or, at most, an Audio Precision analyzer, which isn’t cheap but costs half as much as Michael Fremer’s reference phono preamplifier.

Such an approach allows the manufacture of players and DACs that can be sold for perhaps $1000, or even several hundred less than that, assuming it’s manufactured in a low-wage country. Manufacture it in the US or Europe and, even if it’s built to an exceptionally high standard, the price can remain quite low.

A top-quality digital source, then, is a commodity, like gasoline, a dozen eggs, or flash drives. It’s pointless to spend more, or so the thinking goes. Or perhaps not.

Digital is analog

The subject of this review—the CH Precision D1.5—is hardly a commodity. Fundamentally, it’s a transport, built to a very high standard and equipped to read and output data from CDs, SACDs, and MQA CDs. But it’s modular. It accepts add-in cards that turn it into a CD/SACD/MQA-CD player.

Equipped as a transport—with, of course, a digital output card—the D1.5 costs a formidable $41,000. Equipped as a player, with two mono DAC boards added in, the price rises to $46,000.

As I prepared to write this review, I spoke by Zoom with CH Precision’s two principals: Florian Cossy, the “C” in CH Precision and also in “CEO,” and Thierry Heeb, the “H” in CH Precision and a senior researcher at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland specializing in audio/video DSP. Cossy and Heeb are both engineers, Cossy on the analog side and Heeb—obviously—digital.

During our chat, both admitted the possibility, even the likelihood, that other, quite different approaches could be equally valid. Still, they have their own vision, their particular approach. Their job, as they see it, is to execute that vision to the best of their collaborative