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Spaced out. Once break-in had obliterated early delivery dryness, the operative mantra was space is the place. It began with well-recorded 16bit/44.1kHz material and progressed upward with 24bit/352.8kHz DXD and DSD tracks from 2L and Channel Classics. Whilst I do not subscribe to the current DSD craze—a recording's provenance and quality of execution stomp delivery format any day—tracks treated with care to begin with and then released at greater data density do exhibit more acute audible space, be that real acoustic venue or faux ambiance cleverly doctored with ProTools & Co.
DAC2-DSDse into Nagra Jazz, FirstWatt SIT1 and soundkaos Wave 40 + Zu Submission
Frequency response linearity, tonal and transient/decay balance are the basic traits of a hifi's psych profile. For a human it'd be sex, size, weight, age and race. Audible space as a foreign venue overlaying your own is a deeper less surface quality. It's akin to a person's personality. A passport snap or hifi measurement can't tell you anything about it. The more transparent to recorded personality a system is, the more all your recordings exhibit differences. This transcends the basics of 'good recordings sound greater, bad recordings sound worse'. It's really about how musicians and/or recording engineers played the room; how big said room was; how reflections and reverb times imprinted themselves on tone; where and how close the eyes of the microphones were relative to the various instruments. It's about the creation of the thing. It's even about glimpses into the recording process itself. Hearing clearly different decay times surround parallel instruments betrays multi-tracked chicanery. It's artifice at its worst. Could a single performance possibly occur in differently sized rooms all at once? Not. It only happens when you carelessly overlay stuff, some of it perhaps emailed in from a studio halfway around the world. Yet if that's recorded, you'll hear it clearly. Cohesion becomes fish food.


If one hears more space, it's due to greater magnification power. Lower noise floor. Greater S/N ratio. It's about secondary and tertiary context data, not the primary base stuff even a cheap hifi gets right. Without beating around the bush, that's what the DAC2-DSDse did. As anyone with experience of true omnipolar speakers knows—my in-house reference is German Physiks' HRS-120—reflections recorded or induced by your room enhance tone. That's why the first thing a thin lead vocal gets from the engineer is a dash of reverb. It's MSG against flatness and dryness. Obviously any component which better unravels spatial context of reflections and ambient backdrop must by definition exhibit better tone than one that strips away this backdrop for a more cut-out rendering. Calling a component 'spacious' or 'spatially revealing' yet dry and hard in the same breath would be an oxymoron.


What we just did was skip strategically over the basics of amplitude linearity, tonal balance et al. Any advanced digital gear like today's not plagued by having to drive a variable load or worse, convert electrical into acoustic impulses like a speaker, nails those basics. Nothing of note to report there. On the subject of space you'd expect—and get—depth and layering. If recorded. And, the immediate vicinity around the performers is lit up. That's not the silly blackness reviewers talk of as an absence of noise. At least to me such blackness is all about the famous 1979 slogan of the first Alien movie. "In space no one can hear you scream." That's about a vacuum. Absence of oxygen. Suffocation. Death. But space directly around any music performer is filled with oscillating air molecules. There's action. There's air. Life. Energy. That's far from nothing even if it's invisible. If more of that action survives translation from recording to playback, our sense of realism wins. Suspension of disbelief is better. The illusion becomes an easier sell. If we want to be sold there's less work to do. Less effort hypnotizing ourselves into a different reality. Here the revised DAC2 was a first-rate salesman. Even if we don't have the scratch we want to do the deal. And so the deal gets done. Without blood-curdling screams in space.


From the above follows logically that what I call connective tissue—the stuff between and around performers—was audible. This borrowed a bit from what SETs are so good at. And from that follows that tone texture in general wasn't dry or deep-fried crisp but more elastic. This flew (smack!) in the face of early ESS lore. Mind, the qualifier was early. AURALiC's Vega, even Resonessence's affordable Concero, have long since turned that page. Enrique Heredia Negri's Flamenco guitar accompanying singer Agustín Lara on El último beso for saucy Mexican boleros had that delectable minor tackiness whereby individual tones detach like drops in slow motion. They peel off unhurried like dew from a blossom. No machine-gun hail of bone-dry bullets. Solo piano could exhibit the same effect. Lovely!


Naturally a deliberately dry venue will sound drier than a vastly wet monastery such as m.a. recordings' Todd Garfinkle likes to give his artists. Since I'm a very bad audiophile—I always go for music first, sound fourth—most of my stuff is produced, artificed and manufactured off the rack in studios where labels pay by the hour. But feed the Wyred some choice Channel Islands fare where the producers are audiophiles themselves. Now space rolls out like a red carpet.

With Jajgit Singh's The Voice from Beyond of seven previously unreleased tracks published after the Indian ghazal legend's passing, the recording quality differs wildly. About this the DAC2 made no bones. Its job wasn't to homogenize and downplay these differences. It was to call 'em out. Which it did. None of them matched the quality of Enja's Afar for the Lyonese Doumka Clarinet Ensemble which features Hervé Bouchardy on clarinet, piccolo clarinet, basset horn; Alexis Ciesla and Franck René on clarinet and bass clarinet; and Christophe Gauvert on double bass/guitar and Christophe Durand on drum set, cajon and percussion. Three blackwoods harmonizing over a beat-grooving upright bass is a fine occasion to mine for timbre.

Zu Event power, RCA and XLR cables; Van den Hul AES/EBU; KingRex USB; Tombo Trøn S/PDIF
Two Turkish productions for Aşkin Nur Yengi and Adnan Şenses gave the nod to the lady for production values but didn't undermine my appreciation for the aging Adnan's still virile high registers. Hifi discourse routinely soft pedals the categorical importance of source-material quality. The better your gear, the more you'll notice the very breadth on tap. Whether patently inferior flatter recordings interfere with your enjoyment depends. Has your obsession with flawless sound crippled you for the simpler pleasures you knew at 18 when a crappy car radio caused chicken pimples as a friend calls goose bumps?

If so, don't dare blame the gear. Get something which obscures those differences so everything sounds more or less alike. Only a truly high-resolution source digs deep enough into spinning/streaming substance to make stand-out albums stand out and contrast the middling stuff. If you focus on music first, extra-good sound becomes the needless bonus. It enhances the experience but doesn't invalidate albums without it. So Afar sounded even better than the already good Choro e Bossa Nova where Sabine Meyer's less famous brother Wolfgang duetizes on clarinet with Peter Lehel's saxophone against piano, bass and percussion. I duly noticed, then went right back appreciating the tendril-like woodwind interplay which reminded me of Quadro Nuevo's concertized café music.


I thought the DAC2 did a particularly brilliant job of articulating the instrument's timbre I know best. This made the same clarinet player exhibit very different tone from one recording to the next even though published on the same BIS label. I'm thinking of the insanely talented Martin Fröst with Dances to a Black Pipe who on the "Hungarian Dances" does things that nearly shouldn't be possible. Meanwhile in his reading of the Crusell Concertos 1-3 album his tone doesn't quite live up to the former's promise. Needless to say the Wyred didn't specialize in blackwood tone. It did the same for all instruments and singers. When you've played any instrument for 15 years it's simply that you instantly see things which elude anyone else not that so familiar. Someone else does the same with guitar, piano or drums.


Which returns us to our constant theme of more difference. Espousing that one heard exactly what was recorded is a trap which most reviewers fall into like blind lemmings. Was one actually present at the recording and mastering sessions and compared the final approved take to the commercial release? If not any such statements are pure balderdash. It's lazy if wishful thinking. The best I can tell you is that the Wyred stretched out the differences between recordings. If we assume this meant operating at a high level of distinction... I'd say right on.


Because none of us know what a specific recording is supposed to sound like unless we made it ourselves, we default to gear comparisons. Whilst those still don't nail right from wrong or less right, they attempt to fix a component's own personality, voicing or aroma. On that count the Wyred4Sound DAC2 DSDse was noticeably more detail magnified and unmasked than Burson's $1.850 Conductor and on par with the Vega and Hex. The AURALiC's design brief called for optimization of DSD. Hence even PCM gets endowed with a whiff of DSD which here means more technicolor saturation and a certain pervasive sweetness. The non-up/oversampling Hex is drier but more tautly timed. The Vega plays it more elastic and lush. The Wyred sat between those two but huddled somewhat closer to the Dutch. On the level, with more features than the latter but feature-matched with the Hong Kong deck. Versus my souped-up two-box SOtM USB bridge with constant battery power and super clock, going DAC direct with my split KingRex USB leash still showed a small gap. The 'detour' through the Korean which added an AES/EBU cable was more sumptuous. The massed strings on Fröst's interpretation of the Astor Piazzolla favorite "Oblivion" showed that off. I'm not sure why—usually less is more particularly where digital cable transmissions are concerned—but the external USB bridge still held an edge of even more space.

Score. Without a plain-Jane DAC2 for comparison I can't tell you the extent of the upward leap the fully loaded version has made. What I can say is that the early ESS Sabre chip criticisms which also involved Wyred have been laid to rest. High pixel count is no longer paid for with textural dryness and a kind of cactus prickliness. Now there are curves, the more so as file density goes up as long as a recording was good to start with. With 32bit/384kHz acceptance the worlds of DXD and DSD files have become your oyster. Hopefully the available musical catalogues hold your interest. If space is the final frontier, the DAC2 will lay out quite the night-sky canvas if it was rolled up in your CDs. When invisible space as the ætheric matter in which a performance took place to be energized by it becomes tacitly intuited... that more fully drawn third dimension can add a lot of enjoyment over and above its content of pure tones. And that's exactly what this machine is on about. Shall we go for the cheap thrill to close up shop and say "far out"? Hell yes. Let's!
 
Quality of packing: Very good.
Reusability of packing: A few times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: A cinch.
Condition of component received: Flawless.
Completeness of delivery: Perfect. Includes owner's manual, remote, driver CD/ROM, USB cable, trigger cable and power cord.
Human interactions: Very good and always candid.
Pricing: Good value. Directly competitive with genre greats like the Metrum Hex and AURALiC Vega.
Final comments & suggestions: If your system gain doesn't mandate deep attenuation to hit your standard playback levels, this machine's comprehensive featurization of preamp mode—remote volume, remote balance, remote polarity inversion, remote input switching—allows for amp-direct drive. If you must invoke considerably more than 10dB of such digital attenuation you'll likely prefer an active preamp but the extent (or give'n'take) of the difference will depend and should be personally tested. If you can eliminate a preamp, your system will be simpler and cost less.
Wyred4Sound website