B.Audio B.DAC EX digital converter

B.Audio B.DAC EX digital converter

The brothers Bermann – whose initial graces a small but aesthetically pleasing range of electronics – are keen to maintain aesthetic continuity in their creations. The B.dac shares its front panel design with the rest of B.audio’s product range and at a glance could be confused with almost any of them. I looked at the pre-and power amplifiers from their entry-level B.one range in Issue 187 and save for a few more dots around the controller the B.dpr one preamplifier looks exactly like this DAC. This commonality of design makes for more economical casework manufacture and it does look good; B.audio gear is nothing if not stylish.

The B.dac is the top converter in the company’s range and in EX guise it incorporates a streaming module that can be controlled with a range of third-party software including UPnP, Roon and MPD apps. It offers a good range of digital inputs including S/PDIF via wire or fibre, AES/EBU over XLR and USB, it also receives Airplay from your iOS devices. The EX version adds an RJ45 for ethernet connection (there’s no Wi-Fi receiver) and a USB slot for music stored on a suitable drive. Interestingly it has integrated cloud/UPnP server access, which means you can access your music from any location, maybe even the yacht. It plays PCM up to 32-bit/384kHz and DSD up to 256, so it’s not groundbreaking but more than adequately equipped in terms of file playback compatibility. B.audio do not list the formats it can handle but this side of things seems to be settled now and all decent DACs can convert pretty well to any sensible format.

Another unusual feature is DSP room correction which is designed to allow frequency response adjustments. These adjustments are made with the chunky if initially confusing remote handset with its seven unmarked buttons. I was able to access the settings but adjusting them requires a bit more explanation than is provided in the manual. Hopefully, B.audio’s dealers will be better informed.

The tech inside this DAC is clearly not off-the-peg stuff and includes a jitter removal process that the Bermann bros claim to be unique and is said to eliminate the timing errors that are inherent to digital signal transmission. Their approach is to combine phase lock loop and asynchronous resampling tech using a method that is claimed to avoid the limitations of both by incorporating their own clocking for all sources and sending that to the conversion stage alongside the signal. The B.dac also has upsampling filters using a custom-designed DSP engine with a linear phase filter, this is designed in-house and said to reduce pre-ringing whilst preserving the transient response.

The power supply side of any digital audio device is more critical than sometimes seems to be appreciated, albeit the growth in third-party supplies for low voltage devices would suggest that the message is getting through. B.audio use separate transformers for the digital and analogue sides of the circuit with regulators for each element within those circuits. No details of the DAC itself are included in the spec for this converter except for the fact that it’s a multibit sigma-delta type which suggests that it’s a conventional chip-based device rather than something concocted in-house.