So popular was this product that PS Audio based all our DAC products around the modules (producing the Ultralink DAC) and eventually we even bought the company, Ultra Analog, so popular were these models. That was a long time ago.
That DAC technology depended on having extremely accurate resistors. In fact, so accurate, that Ultra Analog's secret wasn't in using resistor's that were more accurate than anyone else's (they couldn't because we'd reached the theoretical limit on accuracy). Instead, clever engineering and a bag full of tricks did the job. But that job of increasing the number of bits was at its very limit - one pushed to the extreme by this very DAC module, used in so many fine DACS of the day.
Yet today 24 and even 32 bit DACS are everywhere. These everyday DACS have performance so much better than the 20-bit Ultra Link module that the engineers of that period would have cried "impossible"! No one seems to have noticed just how much has changed since the days of Ultra Analog's miracle 20 bit wonder - changes we seem to take for granted. Using the classic ladder DAC architecture, each added bit is exponentially more difficult to achieve than the last.
What changed? Did we solve the problem of the ladder DAC or did something else happen?
Climbing the ladder
So popular was this product that PS Audio based all our DAC products around the modules (producing the Ultralink DAC) and eventually we even bought the company, Ultra Analog, so popular were these models. That was a long time ago.
That DAC technology depended on having extremely accurate resistors. In fact, so accurate, that Ultra Analog's secret wasn't in using resistor's that were more accurate than anyone else's (they couldn't because we'd reached the theoretical limit on accuracy). Instead, clever engineering and a bag full of tricks did the job. But that job of increasing the number of bits was at its very limit - one pushed to the extreme by this very DAC module, used in so many fine DACS of the day.
Yet today 24 and even 32 bit DACS are everywhere. These everyday DACS have performance so much better than the 20-bit Ultra Link module that the engineers of that period would have cried "impossible"! No one seems to have noticed just how much has changed since the days of Ultra Analog's miracle 20 bit wonder - changes we seem to take for granted. Using the classic ladder DAC architecture, each added bit is exponentially more difficult to achieve than the last.
What changed? Did we solve the problem of the ladder DAC or did something else happen?
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