Well-heeled fans of BorderPatrol DACs are more likely to purchase Volti Audio's fully horn-loaded Vittora loudspeaker ($25,750/pair), or Volti's more affordable horn-bass reflex hybrid, the Rival ($7900/pair), which caused John to throw up his arms in despair: "I hate it when an audio writer says, 'Listen for yourself'but in the case of the Rival, that's all I can say."īorderPatrol's founder, a tall, British-born contrarian named Gary Dews, designed the DAC and manufactures it in Waldorf, Maryland. Well-heeled fans of Benchmark's rigorous measurements-oriented design favor such loudspeakers as TAD's Compact Reference CR1 ($37,000/pair matching stands, $3600/pair), of which JA said: "Summing up the measured performance of the TAD Compact Reference CR1 is easy: This is textbook behavior!" The BP DAC is at the opposite end of the spectrum of engineering and audio beliefs from such contemporary sigma-delta ( eg, ESS Sabre ES9028PRO)based machines as Benchmark's DAC3 HGC ($2195), which received JA's highest praise: "Benchmark's DAC3 HGC offers state-of-the-art measured performance. (I asked JA not to say "broken" or "obsolete"he must think of a kinder word.) The BP DAC is an outlier: a 16-bit, R-2R, non-oversampling (NOS), DAC designed around the ancient and discontinued Philips TDA1543 converter chipwhich, I can assure you, is unlikely to earn high marks on John Atkinson's test bench. Today I'll need every good metaphor and precise adjective I can think of to describe BorderPatrol Audio Electronics' fully optioned Digital to Analogue Converter SE ($1850). The best I can do is tell you where the review component directed my attention, what it sounded like, and what thoughts and feelings occurred as I listened to my music. Sadly, I have little confidence in their ability to describe my experiences. I also use: accurate (I hate that word), neutral (what's that?), colored, clean, transparent, open, musical. Left brain/right brain, yin/yang, male/female, Apollonian/Dionysian, classical/romantic, painterly/linear, dark/light, hard/soft, warm/cool.I use these contrasting adjectives in my reviews because I feel some confidence in their ability to convey the nature of what I experience while listening to recordings with whatever new audio box sits before me in the listening studio. He doesn't ask why, he just paints a skyJohn Cale and Lou Reed, "Trouble with Classicists," from Songs for Drella The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky
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