We’re still on the trail of defining the basic requirements for the output stage of a DAC or, for that matter, a preamplifier because the two are quite the same in terms of requirements. However, today will be a slight detour as I made an observation last night I wanted to share. Terri and I […]

A few readers have asked me to back off on being uber technical and get back to writing more about sound and high end audio from a listener’s perspective rather than a designer’s and I’ll definitely do that but I did want to finish up on our little series about DACS. One thing to remember […]

Now that we’ve figured out why we need an analog output stage on our DAC let’s discuss why it’s so important to the sound of the DAC. We started this thread because one of my readers asked a really good question: why, if most of a DACS’ internals and technologies are devoted to decoding the […]

We’ve worked our way through the internal DAC chain to a point where we have finally decoded the numeric musical data into current steps, then converted those steps into voltage. It is at this point that we wind up with our music back into the original form it started with but with one exception: there’s […]

We’ve briefly discussed getting the digital audio stream into the DAC and then decoding those bits back into a form of analog that gets us a lot closer to being able to play it on our systems. At the output of the DAC chip we have a series of current steps that need to be […]

We’re starting down the path of trying to unravel a bit of the topic why the analog output stage of a DAC is so important: perhaps more important than the DAC itself. To begin let’s first take a DAC apart into its 4 main categories so we can start with a clear understanding of what’s […]

Today’s a day for us to spend with our family and friends and enjoy life, music and the pursuit of happiness. I just wanted to pass along some good cheer and thank all of my readers for their trust and friendship. I hope we can continue to build community and friendship for a growing number […]

Yesterday we covered Analog Codingshowing how we have analog in and analog out with a Class D amplifier and no magic decoding process is required as we have in PCM. The direct output of the PWM engine is a series of on and off again pulses that can be fed directly into a loudspeaker to […]

Sorry, I am writing this yesterday and when I went to input the publish date I saw it would be the 21st, winter solstice, my son Sean’s birthday and “the end of the world”. So I am guessing that’s a bunch of bunk and I better have a post ready. We’re now ready to start […]

Yesterday we explained how a single ended power amplifier worked and what the differences are between our traditional power amplifier output stage and this unique topology. Today I want to wrap up the background series on traditional amp topologies so we can move on to learn about Class D – a topology that is still […]

Yesterday’s post covered what Class B in a power amplifier means and the day before we explained Class A. It’s probably instructive to review what we’ve learned so far as there are new readers jumping on board daily and I don’t want to leave them out. We’re learning something about the different classes of amplifier […]

First off, we’ve published a new videohttps://vimeo.com/55572974 which is a behind the scenes look at what goes into building a PerfectWave product. It’s pretty interesting if you’ve never seen what it takes to make a modern piece of audio equipment. It’s probably not politically correct to write about different classes of people, but I trust […]