Phantom Gold DAC

[f1eng]

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.

Quite so.
OTOH I am not sure that there are any recordings available which have not had at least a PCM>DSD conversion since pretty well anything in editing and mixing is done in PCM.
I would be interested if there does exist a way of editing/mixing a DSD recording without DSD>PCM>DSD conversions. I seem to remember rumours that Sony might be making a DSD capable editing suite, but that may have been dropped due to insufficient interest???