Metrum Acoustics Adagio Digital Preamplifier / DAC (Black)

Description

What more can you do after launching one of the best dacs
available today?

We are aware that our current flagship Pavane is hard to
beat but at least one idea was not realized yet. The idea of having a decent volume control to prevent a
necessary pre-amplifier could improves performance dramatically.
However, we also know that the way of introducing such device in the signal
chain can also have a negative effect.

Experiments were made and as result the best sound was
coming directly from our Transient™ modules. Even the digital approach did
not convinced us but still one idea was not tried yet. Especially in case of
R2R ladder dacs it is quite easy to change the output voltage of the dac by
changing its reference voltage but to realize this, dedicated dac boards were
designed to get the best regulation possible.

Like the Pavane, “forward correction” techniques are used to
drive both mono dac boards. The result of this process is an extremely high
linearity, right down to -140 dB, which gives the Adagio a realistic 24 bit
dynamic range.

The Adagio is a step forwards as it omits a pre-amplifier.
It is musical, honors the Non-oversampling principle and simultaneously
incorporating the technological progress that has been made over the years.