News from HK dealer -Expert 1000PRO

[Dr Tone]

Anyway, I had a thought.....

We now have some information regarding the new DAC/ADH core:

# New ADH Intelligence
Each element of the ADH core have been carefully rethought in order to design the new version of the ADH Intelligence which provides significant performances improvements at all power levels.

Revolution ADH hybrid circuit sensor in Class A (controlling Class D current amp) has improved from 8bits to 10bits (jump from 256 levels to 1024 levels)

Quite what all this means in real world terms I am not sure, my wild guess is that the new amps will sound better, maybe more detail, better definition and dynamics etc.  Although this remains to be seen.  (heard)

Anyway, one thing occurred to me.  This forum is full of many posts dealing with the issue of what sounds best plugged into a Devialet, different streamers, AIR, Mutec's, microRendus, Aurenders vs Melcos vs Byston vs Aurilic, etc, etc.  More recently, even the epically expensive dCS upsampler and master clock has found itself plugged into a Devialet.  Reading though this forum you can get some idea of what sounds best at various price points.  A few of us will have been lucky enough to have listened to some of these options in back to back testing, and will know via their own ears what works and sounds good.
But now we have this new DAC / ADH intelligence 10 bit configuration, I think this has the potential change everything!  Consider, this new 'ADH intelligence' might be so smart that every and anything plugged into a Devialet will be elevated to more or less the same sound quality.  So all of a sudden, £10k streamers will sound much the same as £1k devices, or even AIR, quite simply the dac is so good it sorts out all the front end issues and drives SQ to the max.  Or maybe this will flip the other way, and the sonic benefits from an Aurender W20, dSC or whatever rig will actually provide a bigger and more apparent sonic leap, making the front end even more critical than it was before.  Then we have AES/EBU vs USB, the impact of this is reasonably well established with the current models, but will this change with the new DAC/ADH?  Or maybe the new DAC stuff is just marketing speak, and things will remain much as they were.  I guess it will be fun finding out either way!

When I read 8bit vs 10bit I think in terms of color displays.  Most monitors these days are 8 bit panels and can display a certain finite amount of colors.  10bit panels expand that color pallet.  Way more shades of red as an example.  Digital cameras are capable of capturing a wider range of colors than most monitors are capable of displaying, so these more expensive 10bit monitors are used by professionals to get a more accurate representation of the colors captured by a camera.

If I read between the lines, a richer, wider and more detailed analog output from the Devialet is what I expect.  But only time will tell.

That said, I think this really has nothing to do with streamers and content fed to the Devialet as it will still be working in it's usual 24/192kHz PCM domain or hopefully 24/384kHz now.  It wouldn't make all streamers sound alike unless they have found a way filter out all parasitic noise and have some magical reclocker technology making all inputs sound exactly the same.


That's my take on it anyway.