Intro
Contents
Fact: we have entered a class where every detail counts. Both listening and measuring-wise, this was a pretty tough review. But we do love a challenge at Alpha Audio. We review and analyze the MSB Premier dac, along with the Digital Director. What this is all about? No worries: we explain.
MSB Technology is an American high-end brand of converters and amplifiers. The company is based in Silicon Valley. Led by Jonathan and Daniel Gullman, the company has been designing and manufacturing high-end audio for about 25 years now.
Modular
What we immediately noticed is that the design of the dacs is completely modular. So you can very easily change inputs yourself. This is particularly friendly, since a system is not always a static entity. Suppose you would like to start with streaming. With an MSB dac, that’s very easily done by inserting a streaming module in an empty slot. Very nicely done!
Also, the upgrade path is kindly arranged. According to importer Very Fine Solutions, you only pay the difference. The ‘old’ dac is also taken back. No hassle selling your old dac. We don’t see that very often.
Own design
Not many dac manufacturers really make their own dac chips. There’s a good reason for that: it’s quite complex. Some examples of manufacturers who do it all by themselves are: dCS, Sonnet, Grimm, Mola Mola and… MSB.
Now it’s going a bit far to go into complete detail here. But simply put – and MSB explains it that way in their white paper – their ‘Sign Magnitude Ladder DAC’ does not work the same as a regular ladder dac. The main difference is that the ‘bits’ are basically already ‘half loaded’ (i.e., around the 0 point). The charge is then adjusted to the desired level. According to MSB, this works better because that is where our hearing is most critical – zero crossing point – and only small adjustments are needed. This results in fewer errors at the end, since with a ladder the accuracy depends on the sum of all the errors in the ladder.
Now there are many roads to Rome and the ladder itself is only one part of the whole chain. And after countless mails back and forth with Jonathan from MSB, we know that MSB has many more developments of their own, including the femto-clocks, pre-processing of the digital signal, and their filters, of course. Both in the Director and the DAC itself, MSB uses filters that they unfortunately – but understandably – don’t want to tell us very much about. In particular, this is about pre-processing where the necessary magic happens (our words).
The director
Speaking of the Director (16500 for the Premier DAC). Surely this is a wondrous little box. What we at Alpha Audio have talked about regularly is keeping out noise and other nasty influences. Dacs and streamers in particular can suffer greatly from this. Keeping out (common mode) noise helps improve playback quality.
MSB has developed the Director for this purpose. An additional component to which you connect everything. The Director then has two important connections to the DAC: a data link and a clock sync link. These are both optical to achieve complete, galvanic decoupling.
The beauty is that everything adjusts itself: you connect the Director and the MSB Premier (31000 Euros) in our case, immediately sees that it is a slave of the Director. Inputs are automatically recognized and settings are not necessary.
By the way, you can turn the filtering of the Director on and off. This is audible. Which one you prefer is up to you. Just like there is a Video mode for watching movies. The internal latency then goes from about 260ms (we saw during the measurement sessions) to 6ms, which is no longer audible.
