dCS Audio was founded in Cambridge in 1987 as a signal-conversion consultancy, and its first customers were not in music. The company's early work was for aviation and aerospace, including the Blue Vixen radar system for the Royal Navy's Sea Harrier. Converting signals accurately under conditions that punish error is the discipline the company was built on, and it still uses bespoke test equipment developed out of that radar and broadcast work.
Music followed. The dCS Audio 900 of 1989 was taken up by mastering engineers including Bob Ludwig and Tony Faulkner; the BBC commissioned dCS Audio converters and clocking to transfer its archive; dCS Audio licensed its converter technology to others and worked with Philips on DSD. The first product intended for the home was the Elgar, in 1996.
At the centre of everything is the Ring DAC, which dCS Audio designed itself and has refined for thirty years. Where a conventional ladder converter uses binary-weighted current sources — and inherits the small errors in their values as distortion that tracks the music — the Ring DAC uses sources of equal value and continuously rotates which of them fire. Component tolerances are still there, but they are decorrelated from the signal and pushed out as white noise instead of harmonic distortion. It is the difference between an error you can hear and one you cannot.
The range runs from the Lina system through Bartók, Rossini, and Vivaldi to the Varèse System, the flagship launched in 2024. Existing Vivaldi, Rossini, and Bartók owners are not stranded: the APEX hardware upgrade retrofits the current Ring DAC revision into equipment already bought — the Vivaldi APEX DAC is that revision in its full-size form. Everything is designed, hand-assembled, and tested in Cambridgeshire.
A dCS front end deserves a server that keeps up — see Innuos and Grimm Audio — and a proper listening session to hear what the Ring DAC actually does.
