DSD-WR

The DSD-WR is absolutely exceptional, and represents the best value component I’ve experienced in audio.

That’s all you *really* need to know, but to elaborate: it brings a level of analogue, natural tonality, with incredible resolution and the most devastating low end I’ve ever heard.

I had a Rockna Wavedream Reference SIgnature prior to this. I found it highly impressive…for 45 minutes. Then an imperceptible sense of fatigue took over everything. I just didn’t want to listen anymore. Moving instead to the DSD-WR was a strange mix of luck, happenstance, and a design philosophy that seemed to answer everything I’d been looking for. In DACs before this there was always a tradeoff. Lampizator Genya Plus had incredible stage and an engaging presentation, but images were either soft or lacking resolution. The edge of images seemed fuzzy no matter what tubes I rolled. WRS I’ve mentioned already.

With DSD-WR there are no compromises. When I listen to my favourite music, it’s the best I’ve ever heard it. My jaw frequently falls open and remains there until a song’s end. It also does this amazing thing where it makes my best recordings sound incredible, and despite its transparency manages to make my poor recordings still sound good too.

I don’t know how Alex has managed it, but I know now that I will buy absolutely anything I can afford from APL in future.

Dear Alex, after more or less 200 hours of break-in time, today I decided to make the first thorough listening session.
Just to put DSD-WR in the most “comfortable” conditions, the listening session was carried out by comparing the master tape copy with the corresponding digital versions, stored in both DSD and PCM formats. Not to introduce further variables, to make this session I preferred to set WR on DF-Zero and DSD256.
I focus on the parameters that particularly struck me, because in my experience they have always been the most critical for the DAC’s performance compared to the reproduction of an analog master tape copy.
Symphonic music: typically, despite what we expect form high-res files, following the “crescendo” up to the full of orchestra, at a certain point the feeling of saturation gradually begins, so, details and the representation of 3D space are the first to collapse, the orchestra sounds “loud” but flat, like a “mirror”.
With WR, this phenomenon is much less (I can’t say completely absent) than with all the other DACs I’ve tested in recent years …. but, but, but, for the first time I’ve realized that, at least in my opinion and after these initial tests, the aforementioned “saturation” is not caused, or is not 100% caused, by the DAC’s new D/A conversion, but (probably) by a less-accurate A/D conversion of the file from the analog master.
This is because I have noticed that for the titles I have stored on my NAS in various formats, someone converted years ago to a “normal” 24/96KHz (not to mention also for someone 16/44), sounds better than the corresponding more recent formats released now in DSD256/512 or up to 32/352 KHz.
After this unexpected result, knowing that WR always converts to DSD, if a “normal” 24/96 file sounds better than the corresponding recent DSD version, there’s something unclear with the labels that publish these latest ultra-super-high resolution files. I can accept that WR it’s “magic” and converting a normal 24/96 to DSD, you will never want to listen the original file, but if the saturation phenomenon appears more evident in the same recent DSD file that WR doesn’t “touch” but only converts to D/A, the increased saturation isn’t WR responsibility. At least for now, I can’t find another explanation; you will tell me if I have reached the wrong conclusion.
Timing; from the attacks and speed of the strings in the orchestra, to the hammers of the piano, to the drums and guitars of a jazz or rock band, WR it’s simply fantastic, better to say: correct. It respects the true speed of the attacks of live listening and doesn’t “boost” them to give a false feeling of greater dynamics and body, as so often happens these days, even with new LP reissues created from digital files. In this way, audiophiles are happier and can say that reissue is tremendously better than the original !
This is once more the nth mockery by the recording industry for the audiophiles, who don’t yet have (or, at worst, aren’t interested in) the experience of live listening, which allows them to understand when a dynamic peak is realistic or fake. Once again, in this respect too, I’ve noticed the same tendency in the more recent new hi-res files; evidently the method “works.” Sorry for the digression.
Low sound level passages; another great performance from the WR, which preserves details much better and at much lower levels than its competitors I’ve heard so far. The feeling, unfortunately I’ve too often listened, that below a certain recording level the digital conversion begins to produce long lines of zeros and the listener collapses into a total spaceless silence, just as if we were outside the Earth’s atmosphere, with WR is practically absent. I think it’s significant to note that in this case, we find ourselves in the opposite situation to the aforementioned saturation phenomenon, because if the same file listened with other DACs, in very low-level passages gave me the impression of less detail, less deep black background, less air around the performers, this means that the culprit was not the file but the DAC.
After this first test, for the first time I can say that when a DAC works with this philosophy and these requirements, “afterwards” there is not so useful insisting on the hardware, because the question must shift to the possibility of finding the truly best files to play… in the end, as the years go by, nothing has changed: first the quality of the recording, thereafter the quality of the tapes at the beginning of stereo era, then the LP’s quality, of the CDs and now of the files.
Wanting to summarize in a single phrase my feedback, I can say: “WR is the best DAC I have ever listened”. There’s no need of further superlatives, rhetorical comments, and so on; let me express my most sincere and greatest compliments & admiration for your work.
Ciao
Fabio – The Recorderman http://www.therecorderman.com