Cracking the case gives us this front-row view on the switching power supply and behind it the digital PCB. Use the mouse-over magnifying function to zero in. From the gleaming copper liner you know this to be the D-580. "Our resonant power supplies rely on sine not triangle waves and particularly in the high frequencies are quieter than linear equivalents."

Three vertical Tesla-coil boards in the D-580 pile up on their noise-filtering action. "We're living in a constantly worsening sea of RF and EMI all around us. Anything we can do to mitigate some of its effect on our playback system will have audible benefits."

For those who absolutely must see how the chips fall…

… here we understand how Aavik's favored suppliers for sample-rate conversion, D/A conversion, digital receivers and USB transceivers are BurrBrown…

… AKM and XMOS. If from that you can tell what these DACs sound like, stop reading now. For the rest of us, it's lid back on into the hot seat and sweet spot. Here you might like to know that with Aavik, we cross virtual paths again with Volker Bajorat of Cologne's Clockwork Audio. We'd met him earlier in Sven Boenicke's class D amp whose circuit boards Volker files down by hand until they achieve a benign physical resonance. Volker worked with Dieter Ennemoser of C37 lacquer fame on researching the resonant properties of Stradivarius violins which are universally admired for their fine tone. Michael Børresen first met Volker at Nordost. That earlier collaboration continues to inform his present approach to PCB design. It looks at any board as a mechanically resonant object which responds very favorably to being tuned for sympathetic resonance. So Aavik boards conform to particular ratios of width, depth and thickness. The same thinking—each object has a tone—extends to materials. "Scratch an aluminum bar with your nail. It'll screech. Do it with a zirconium bar. Very different. I think that we're at the very beginning of learning and understanding how our chosen materials influence the sound and our experience of it. It's a fascinating field of vast potential."

"None of us really knows how much data we presently hear from Redbook recordings. Each time we lower the noise floor of our components further, we hear new things. How many more remain hidden? Until we truly tap out 16/44.1, it makes no sense to worry about new formats. Let's master what we have first." That's the perfect segue into my listening impressions.