The Aavik SD-880 is the newly released flagship from the Danish manufacturer. It is a DAC and streamer in one.
Scandinavian designs often look just a little different from the rest. This also applies to the Danish Aavik SD-880. According to the manufacturer, the device is designed primarily to eliminate the “intrusive nature” of digital sound. In addition, issues such as unwanted noise have been addressed almost as a matter of course. The heart of the SD-880 is formed by the in-house designed ‘Non-Switching Continuum Processing DAC’. This in turn is coupled with what Aavik believes to be the most advanced streaming module, noise reduction techniques and – on the outside – a bold design.
To analog, without switching elements
The in-house DAC with the already mentioned long name upsamples the digital sound to a sampling frequency of 22 MHz. It then seamlessly converts the sound to analog without the need for switching elements. The Aavik SD-880 features two coaxial S/PDIF inputs, twice TOSLINK optical in and 1 USB input. Another coaxial digital output is also available, plus an analog pair of RCA line outputs for the left and right channels.
The price of the Aavik SD-880 is a bit on the hefty side, probably: €67,000.