CH Precision D1.5 SACD/CD/MQA-CD Player/Transport

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.

- By Jim Austin

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