Light Harmonic Introduces 32/384 Da Vinci DAC

Light Harmonic, a designer and manufacturer of advanced digital audio components, introduces the Da Vinci 384K USB Digital-to-Analog Converter, the world’s first bit-perfect 384K asynchronous USB 2.0 DAC.

Named for the famed Renaissance artist, architect and engineer, the Da Vinci DAC embodies superb digital artistry, unconventional product architecture, and precision engineering. Now shipping, it boasts a lifelike soundstage, exceptional clarity and detail, sparkling transparency, a best-in-class noise floor, a unique rotating chassis, and audio playback virtually indistinguishable from the best analog source.

The Da Vinci DAC is the product of thousands of hours of R&D by a dedicated team of designers and engineers from Germany, Norway and California, including an Industrial Designer whose portfolio includes Europe’s highly regarded Red Dot Design Award, a prestigious international product design prize.

The Da Vinci DAC provides the ultimate digital music playback experience, preserving the data stream in a pure, unaltered form. In achieving Bit-Perfect status, Da Vinci employs a design free from upsampling, oversampling and all digital signal processing to ensure the best possible music playback from users’ systems. However, Da Vinci is far from stripped-down.

It is packed with unique, exclusive features designed to let listeners enjoy lush audio and lossless high-performance digital music. Among its features are several patent-pending technologies, including:

• A 384K/32Bit Asynchronous USB Input, capable of accepting genuine 384K/32Bit pulse code modulation (PCM) digital audio without artificial upsampling.

• Automatic LSB Correction, which corrects digital signals in their least significant bits (LSB) to make 100-percent accurate bit-perfect audio, while extending 16-bit signals to 24- or 32-bit signals, and 24-bit signals to 32 bits.

• 3-L Buffering — A jitter-free, three-layer elastic buffer between the music source and digital sample conversion. The buffer can completely decouple speed fluctuations in the source, enabling Da Vinci to convert music samples using the most accurate core clocks.

• 3X Clocks — Three highly precise -166dB phase-error clocks, one clock for 44.1K, 88.2K, 176.4K and 352.8K music sampling frequencies; one for 48K, 96K, 192K and 384K frequencies; and a third for the USB interface. Da Vinci selects each clock on the fly according to the sample rate of an input file.

Additional features include a sample rate up to 384kHz, a resolution up to 32 bits, dedicated digital power, and a proprietary Duet Engine that uses analog interpolation to double a file’s original sampling rate without digital upsampling, over-sampling, or noise shaping. The result: smoother high frequencies. A pure analog low-pass filter, instead of the more usual digital filter, automatically selects the corner frequency for each sample rate.