MSB's Platinum DAC is the expression of an entirely fresh approach to Digital-to-Analogue conversion. The perspective the industry has adopted concerning DACs has been revisited... and blown away.

MSB designers have been testing their DACs for about 14 years, ever since CDs came out. As the bits have increased so has the digital fatigue factor. The analogue sweetness of vinyl has been lost in the sterile accuracy of precision. Their reference up until now in this regard has been the old MSB GOLD CD Player. It also used a ladder DAC and the MSB power supplies. It is only 16 bits. The Platinum comes closer to recreating the sweetness of analogue with perfect accuracy than anything else. Although still transport dependant, the Platinum presents a truly live performance. We have been disappointed with DVD players as CD transports. The tremendous jitter reduction of the Platinum really helps bring their performance much closer to a good CD transport.

In summary, the sound is open and transparent, accurate but musical, dynamic with great attack, but not fatiguing. It is the best overall sound our team has heard to date. We challenge you to try it for yourself. Be sure to give it at least 3 weeks to burn in.

The Platinum draws from the older, superior ladder technology, but with incredible improvements. The Platinum contains four 46 bit MSB DAC modules (seen below). The Platinum is fully balanced so there is a matched pair of 46 bit DAC modules for the inverted and non-inverted signals on each of the right and left channels. Finally, each DAC module contains one R2R ladder DAC with a 23 bit negative sign and one R2R ladder DAC with a 23 bit positive sign. This design allows the quieter moments in your music to be true to the music, without the linearity errors near zero that plague normal ladder and delta-sigma DAC designs.

With 46 bits of combined resolution, a 24 bit source gives a true 24 bit resolution without the losses and errors that make your normal 16 or 24 bit DAC perform far less than their actual resolution (normal 16 bit DACs only muster a meager 12 bits of resolution). The Platinum is carefully designed so as to require no DC correction in the output stage. This allows direct DC coupling on the output stage for pure, uncolored sound -- with no output filtering to muck up your high end or smear your bass attack. And for those who require a balanced analogue output, the separate positive and negative DACs directly drive the balanced outputs, with no analogue output stage at all!

The MSB Platinum grants the user the ability to upsample from ANY lower audio standard to 24bit/132.3kHz (3 times the CD rate). This is a selectable feature and may be turned off. To play a 24/192 disc the Platinum only needs an input option installed to be fully compatible. This upsampling feature also dynamically buffers and re-clocks all the data and clock signals to provide a virtually jitter-free source directly to the DACs. Interpolation is also selectable, with 16X or 8X being possible. The selectable digital filter response permits the user to choose the filter design they prefer. It allows for the selection of a standard brick-wall filter or a slow roll-off filter, both at half the sampling frequency. Each provides the listener with a distinct, glorious listening experience. You may favor one or the other, or enjoy changing the filter response to suit the music you listen to.