I suppose my post of yesterday did not make sense to quite a number of people. Apologies for that.
Let me try again.
In 99.9% of the DACs on the marketplace today there is, at their core, a Digital To Analog Converter. What's that mean? It means that when a PCM (or DSD) stream comes into the DAC's input there is one of several types of standard reconstruction schemes used to convert those numeric samples into an analog voltage.
Your DAC might be based on an R2R scheme meaning there is a ladder network of precision resistors (each 2 times higher resistance than the one before it which is where the "2" in R2R comes from) and current sourced switches that respond to digital words to make an analog voltage output. Or, perhaps the DAC uses a SDM to generate a multibit output that is then used to build an analog sample which is then passed on to the output.
A tiny handful of high-end DACs take a different approach, one that our own DirectStream pioneered and currently champions.
In this scheme we go DSD direct. What's that mean? Every digital input, whether PCM or DSD, is upsampled to a very high rate, converted to single bit DSD, and that single bit pulse stream becomes the analog output fed directly into your preamplifier.
Which means, technically speaking, there is no DAC inside of DirectStream. There are no ladder networks, current source switches, or reconstruction schemes generating analog samples that are then passed onto the output.
If you are enjoying the benefits of a DirectStream DAC, you are listening directly to a DSD Pulse Density Stream.
Big difference. Hope that helps.
