Playback Designs Announces the Production Release of their Pinot A/D Quad DSD Converter
The Playback Designs Pinot Analog-to-Digital Quad DSD/PCM Converter
Playback Design has announced the production release of their new Pinot A/D
converter as part of their SONOMA series system incorporating the latest QUAD DSD
FPGA technology.
According to Andreas Koch, president and designer of Playback Designs, this
ground-up new ADC product brings the performance and emotion of the finest
analog recordings to the digital home and professional music playback system.
Tests with critical listeners revealed that the Pinot ADC is so transparent that it
could not reliably be distinguished from the analog source.
Rear view of the Playback Designs A/D showing the input and output ports
Pinot ADC is a state-of-the art A/D converter which outputs any PCM/DSD
format and interfaces to a computer for recording wav/dsf/dff files via USB. It also
connects directly to the Merlot DAC via fiber-optic ST cable for native playback
monitoring. Pinot is the ultimate tool to convert all your analog sources
(tape/vinyl) to the highest quality digital format possible. The same recording
software provided with the Merlot DAC is used with Pinot. List price is $7500.
Design philosophy: Based on Andreas Koch’s digital design experience at
Studer, Sony, Dolby Labs and others, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays)
are used instead of off-the-shelf chips, which impede the ultimate jitter and filter
performance when recovering the musical delicacy and power of analog
recordings. All algorithms are programmable and updateable by the end user.
The results of two years of intense research and unique no-compromise circuit
designs are now condensed in this remarkable new product that quite possibly
could become one of the finest recording devices.
Contact info:
Phone: 925-820-4780
