Denon da-500 d/a converter

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Secure Checkout At Reverb, your safety and security is our priority. About This Listing Here is a very hard to find and extremely useful component that is equally at home in an audiophile home stereo system or in a musician's home studio. The 20 bit Denon DA converts digital PCM signals to analog, with a circuit that is much better sounding than what is built in to most digital source components.

You can connect up to three sources using optical connections and two with coaxial. The DAC outputs a converted signal through a pair of analog RCA outputs, and also passes the incoming digital signal out again through both optical and coaxial outputs. It automatically detects and converts sources at 32 kHz, And there is even an option to "invert" the phasing of the analog signal.

The advantages of having this component are several. It is now available separately at much lower cost in the DA, a multi-input, stand-alone digital-to-analog converter. Denon says the system corrects the 8 shapes of low-level waveforms by using high-speed interpolation between e recorded data points to "recreate the data below the LSB least-significant bit lost upon recording to provide smooth waveform reproduction.

The method chosen varies constantly, adapting to the characteristics of the input signal. Literature for the Alpha process has dramatic before-and-after photos showing how the squared-off appearance of a dB sine wave is transformed to the familiar smooth up-and-down sine pattern. There are problems with all such photos, since they illustrate a distortion that does not occur in real-world signals recorded with proper dithering, but I confirmed by oscilloscope observation that such action does indeed occur on low-level undithered test tones.

The DA is very easy to hook up and use. It has five inputs, three of them standard optical Toslink connectors and two standard coaxial phono connectors. The line-level analog outputs come from a pair of phono jacks. You switch among the inputs with five front-panel pushbuttons. A sixth button inverts the phase, or polarity, of the analog outputs it made no audible difference with any music I played through the device.

The selected digital input signal is also made available at the unit's two digital outputs, one optical and one coaxial driven in parallel, which offers a roundabout way of converting between coaxial and optical digital signals by feeding into the DA in one mode and feeding out from it in the other.

No cables are supplied. The sampling rate of the selected signal is shown by small LED's on the front panel indicating 32, For testing I used the standard I also used the optical inputs to reduce the possibility of picking up hum or other interference, though it turned out that the DA's very low inherent hum level was unaffected by the choice of input.

I would have expected a system that is supposed to give superior low-level performance to have slightly better measured linearity at the bottom of its range, however. The output was low by more than 0.

Still, those are niggling discrepancies, inaudible as such and no reason for concern except to the truly obsessive. This behavior is common and not a problem unless you have access to true greater-thanbit signals very rare outside of recording studios - CD's, for example, carry only bit data.

The DA also performed very well in one of our unconventional tests - reproduction of "shaped dither" such as forms the background noise of many CD's made from bit master tapes through special bit down-conversion processes. This is a very difficult test, since it requires both good low-level linearity and extremely low background noise from the converter proper as well as from the following analog output stages. A device with true bit performance on this test signal would produce a result much closer to the theoretical limit.