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| 26 August 2009 |
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| Available late September/ early October |
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The new Naim DAC is a high performance zero S/PDIF jitter digital to analogue converter. It is power supply upgradeable, includes eight S/PDIF inputs: Two 75Ω BNC, Two RCA and Four TOSLINK (EIAJ optical).
In addition, the Naim DAC includes a USB (Type A socket) on the front and rear panels, which facilitate USB memory stick playback and fully authenticated digital connection from an iPhone or iPod.
What makes it a Zero S/PDIF Jitter DAC
Besides the usual attention to the finest detail for which Naim’s R&D is world-renowned and which will be obvious from the list of key points below, the special element of the design is the way in the Naim DAC that the master clock is not recovered from the S/PDIF signal as in other DACs. Instead, the incoming audio data from S/PDIF is stored in solid-state memory and then clocked back out to the DAC chips using a fixed-frequency local master clock.
This eliminates jitter caused by S/PDIF. In essence the memory, master clock and DAC structure behaves in a similar manner to the CD, master clock and DAC structure of a CD player.
The Naim DAC’s high-speed DSP (digital signal processor) front-end is electrically isolated from its high-resolution DAC and analogue circuits. The two sections are also run from separate power supplies significantly reducing the effect of RF noise (S/PDIF is a source of RF noise) from the S/PDIF circuitry on the DAC stage.
Naim’s buffer or memory method of jitter removal relies on a simple concept: the audio data is clocked into the memory at the incoming inconsistently-timed rate, and is then clocked out of the memory and into the DAC chips using a precise clock. The rate at which the memory fills and empties is controlled by selecting the master clock that best matches the average incoming clock frequency. In this way, the data entering the DAC chips is completely isolated from the incoming jitter.
The Naim DAC digital filtering is handled by an extremely powerful SHARC DSP chip running unique Naim authored code to create an ultra high precision 40bit floating point filter. The filter over-samples by 16 times on 44.1kHz data and provides stop-band attenuation of 156dB with virtually no pass band ripple. Following the digital filter are the DAC’s two mono Burr-Brown PCM 1704 digital to analogue converters, as used in the CD555 CD player. Finally, the Naim DAC features a very high performance, low noise, and low distortion fully discrete analogue output stage.
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