Disc Players

For its first fully integrated CD/SACD/network player, Kalista is not only offering the full gamut of linear-phase, minimum-phase, apodising, brickwall, etc, digital filters that come packaged with the ES9038PRO DAC but – as we saw in the DreamPlay One [HFN Oct '18] – there's an additional low-pass filter that modifies the distinctive time domain and stopband performances of these options. In our early sample these various filters were only enabled once the Leedh volume DSP was switched on. With the latter defeated, the DreamPlay XC's output reverts to fixed mode (three levels are available) with a traditional linear phase/fast roll-off filter as default. In this guise the XC behaves 'as expected' with a full 130dB stopband rejection and response that's flat out to –0.4dB/20kHz, –1.6dB/45kHz and –4.5dB/90kHz with CD/48kHz, 96kHz and 192kHz media, respectively.

However, not only are these native responses influenced by filter setting, the comprehensive synchronous and asynchronous 'signal resampling' may also truncate the response if, say, a 192kHz input is downsampled to 96kHz or 88.2kHz. Interestingly, the DreamPlay XC's inherently low jitter is largely unaffected by 'resampling'. None of this impacts on the SACD performance, however, where the response shows a more progressive treble roll-off of –1.5dB/20kHz, –5.5dB/40kHz, –14dB/60kHz and –28dB/80kHz. PM