The Max DAC
The Max DAC is an apostolic work of digital upsampling art dressed in gold & black. These four-layer, gold-coated, double-copper tracing circuit boards are covered edge to edge with the best parts serious audiophile money can buy, and right in the middle of it lies an Analog Devices AD1896 192kHz Stereo Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter. WHAT?!... Simply a screaming miniaturized gizmo that up-converts any incoming digital audio signal into an ultra high speed, high resolution digital signal without relying on the incoming clock timing, and then down-converts it into the slower 192kHz word stream while interpolating (to get rid of digital 'haze') and re-clocking (to get rid of jitter) before sending the data off to the DAC stage. The end result? ... WHAT?!
Sorry, it’s hard to think with musicians playing inside my head.
Seriously, this DAC is incredibly good-sounding with a natural and warmly well-detailed presentation that belies the typically chilly sound of many digital sources; The Max DAC might almost make you split hairs as you wonder if you're actually hearing your majestic analog vinyl or the low-bitrate music collection off your computer. Sure, a $10,000+ Wadia CD player may out-perform the Max DAC, but just barely. Tweaky ground plane adjustments are made for stability and speed on that thick gold-coated circuit board we mentioned earlier. Quality components don’t end there, though. Only metal thin film resistors and high-end polyphenylenesulfide (poly film) capacitors are used within the audio circuits. Three low-noise, ultra-low dropout power supply regulators isolate the various digital, analog, and mixed signal circuits. This DAC is also available in a balanced-drive version for the HeadRoom Balanced Home and HeadRoom Balanced Max amps with two complete converter sections, one for the normal and one for the inverted audio signal.