Phantom Gold DAC

[ogs]

It should be noted that Devialet's ADH is PCM, so it will never be possible for an ADH equipped product to have true native DSD capability.  As Guillaume mentioned in an earlier post, you would need some kind of conversion prior to ADH, like the Expert's MAT 'DSD Engine'.

As for the quality of the Phantom DAC, I agree with @octaviars earlier post, in that the specification of DAC chip is not as important as you might think.  At the 1000 Pro launch event, I was very disappointed to hear Devialet's Matteiu Pernot explain that they basically using the same DAC chip in the Pro as was used in the Expert.  Matteiu then went on to explain that this did not matter, and that the actual digital to analogue conversion in the Pro was significantly improved by the new ADH architecture.  As to my disappointment in hearing that the DAC chip spec had not changed much, this disappointment vanished once I had an audition of the Pro, which does sound like it has a vastly improved DAC over the Expert.  How good?  Well, I did a back to back test with a Chord DAVE directly after listening to the Pro, I thought the Pro sounded far more 'real' with better resolution, and as mentioned above, the DAVE is a very fine DAC itself.  The Phantom Gold has ADH V2, which I presume (I do not know the detail), moves the Phantom DAC some way in the same technical direction as the Pro.

I would suggest that the reason the current DAC implementation sounds so good is the optimisation Devialet has done around it and the direct connection it has to ADH (and possibly some trickery in the DSP). If Rob Watts' FPGA was an integral part of Devialet's design we would probably have even better sound as Devialet would optimise here too.
This is of course pure speculation as it will never happen.  I agree, the sound of the current DAC is very good. No need to change it.