This show was a coming out for Audiowise ...and the first show of many I plan to attend. As with most things audio that deal with sound quality, it's hard to have a proper evaluation in a noisy hall. My Focal Utopia and HiFiMan HE1000se headphones did demonstrate the benefit of my solutions despite their open back design. It was impossible to do a proper A/B comparison in this environment but for those who knew the tracks being played I received many positive comments. There was also a sense that RF isolation is an important issue whose 'time has come' and many welcomed my efforts to promulgate it. And I appear to be the only one with the focus and expertise to really deliver concrete solutions.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Rob Watts who, as you probably know, is the digital designer behind Chord DACs. I attended both of his talks and he spent time with me discussing my solutions and the entire issue of noise reduction. I can't improve upon anything inside his DACs but I can help them perform at their best. Rob continues to improve his designs toward impossibly small levels of noise and distortion - which BTW are validated only through simulation and listening tests as the levels are so small as to be not measurable with any test equipment. With my products, I do have measurable high frequency noise (at DAC input & output) that is a corollary for sound quality. The mechanism by which this manifests itself in the audio band is hard to measure but is probably due to noise floor modulation from the many harmonics introduced. I am theorizing here but I know the benefits of removing this high frequency noise are clearly audible. I welcome any future DACs from the hands of Rob Watts as their increased transparency will only improve with RF isolation.
