Dawid Grzyb's recent review of Audio Reveal's Hercules DAC on Hifiknights.com is an interesting exposé which still misses to really hammer home its arguably most interesting point. How so? If one hopes to unleash the fine aroma of direct-heated triodes in its most liberated easeful mode, it's best not to burden the glass with the varying low impedance and back EMF of speaker drive. That requires an interceding transformer of many turns and possibly half a mile of wire to step down their high impedance. Still it never comes remotely close to the low output impedance of transistors. It's far more advantageous to let our DHT see the fixed high input impedance of an amplifier or preamp. 47kΩ as a common value for an amplifier's input is a wildly different proposition than the 2-16Ω impedance of average loudspeakers. It translates to cruising not bruising. It also eliminates flea-watt power limits. Note to smart shoppers: to tap the most gush from 2A3, 300B, 45, PX25 & Co, look at DACs or preamps. Choices aren't many but do exist. For DACs the most famous are arguably from LampizatOr but Dawid now introduced us to another Polish alternative. In South Korea there's Allnic, in America Manley Labs and Vinnie Rossi, in the UK SW1X. Resourceful shoppers will come up with more I'm sure…
