Naim Zero S/PDIF Jitter DAC from EnjoytheMusic.com

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From EnjoytheMusic.com

Naim Audio, an England-based company with over 35 years of passionate and committed in music reproduction, has officially launched their Zero S/PDIF Jitter DAC. The Naim DAC is the world's first Apple authenticated high-end DAC, which means it can connect digitally to any iPod or iPhone and take the output digitally of anything that would have been sent to the headphone output. This includes UPnP streaming, the thousands of internet radio stations available via apps on the iPhone or iPod Touch and all the music stored on any iPod. While the Naim DAC has passed all internal and first stage Apple approvals, Naim expects final approval in two to three weeks and easily works with iPod generation 5 and onward. The new Naim DAC is a high performance zero S/PDIF jitter digital to analogue converter that also allows for upgradeable power supply, includes eight S/PDIF inputs (two BNC, two RCA and four Toslink). In addition, the Naim DAC includes a USB (Type A socket) on the front and rear panels, which facilitate USB memory stick playback and fully authenticated digital connection from an iPhone or iPod. Naim feels that key points is the way in the Naim DAC's master clock is not recovered from the S/PDIF signal as in other DACs. Instead, the incoming audio data from S/PDIF is stored in solid-state memory and then clocked back out to the DAC chips using a fixed-frequency local master clock. This is said to eliminate jitter caused by S/PDIF. In essence the memory, master clock and DAC structure behaves in a similar manner to the CD, master clock and DAC structure of a CD player. The Naim DAC's high-speed DSP (digital signal processor) front-end is electrically isolated from its high-resolution DAC and analogue circuits. The two sections are also run from separate power supplies significantly reducing the effect of RF noise (S/PDIF is a source of RF noise) from the S/PDIF circuitry on the DAC stage. Digital filtering is handled by an extremely powerful SHARC DSP chip running unique Naim authored code to create an ultra high precision 40-bit floating point filter. The filter over-samples by 16 times on 44.1 kHz data and provides stop-band attenuation of 156dB with virtually no pass band ripple. Following the digital filter are the DAC's two mono Burr-Brown PCM 1704 digital to analogue converters. The unit can be controlled via included remote or by the Apple remote and is field firmware upgradeable. Sample rates the unit can decode include 32 to 768 kHz at 24-bit for the USB, 32 to 192 kHz at 24-bit for S/PDIF and 48 kHz maximum for the iPod/iPhone. Enjoy the Music.com has reviewed the Naim X series system, which includes the CD-5x CD player, NAC-122x remote preamplifier, Stageline phono preamplifier, NAP-150x power amplifier and Flatcap 2x power supply, and it can be seen at this link.