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Truth for me often surfaces when I set the New York formation Behold… The Arctopus on the track with their album Skullgrid. On it guitarist Colin Marston plays a rarely heard 12-string warr guitar and the number is an unbelievably fast virtuoso jazz/metal spectacle with limping rhythms well beyond 4:4 paths. This musically complex and not necessarily easily accessible fare became so welcoming over ARC’s DAC8 that I got stuck on this record longer than expected. "More fluid, purer and breathier than I'm used to" is how my notes put it. Individual instruments—percussion, bass and that warr guitar—were more realistic and in the positive sense calmer and less screamy. Whilst the latter term might seem curious in this context, it’s the word that spontaneously arose.


On second listen it became clearer what might have contributed to the terms "more fluid/breathier" and "purer". Individual instruments seemed defined or outlined with less edge to be surrounded with more microdynamic air. Tonal differentiation felt cleaner and more pronounced. This was particularly appreciable with this type of sonic witches brew. In this context I also felt fondly reminded of my last review subject, the Sauermann power amp which exhibited similar virtues.


These virtues were equally applicable to Swedish songstress Lykke Li who on the wonderfully ethereal/fragile "Tonight" [Youth Novels, 2008] with its compulsive refrain can appear tonally thin by veering into the glassy and hard. Though it could have been influenced my by ‘ear form’ that day since I don’t use this track regularly or for each review, I did think that over my Audionet/Thiel combo the ARC DAC8 showed the production values of this song to be less questionable; and that I could see why particular choices for its sonic design had been made in the first place. They serve the distanced but sensitive character of the song in a very particular way even if—depending on hifi ancillaries—the result can seem a bit cool and anaemic.


It was thus relevant that this didn’t happen with the DAC8. Yet this result wasn't because it was tonally warmer or guilty of even very small love handles in the midrange. No, this machine was as tonally neutral as a straight arrow, head to toe. This fact required drilling deeper to hit on any real substance required for meaningful hifi discourse. Let’s remain in Sweden but transition to Jazz. Take trumpeter Goran Kajfeš and his number "Subtropics/Kankani Boulila" from 2010’s highly commendable twofer X/Y where he teams one purely acoustic disc with one of more electronica. The right-channel melange of cymbal hits, powdered sugar decays and fluid snare work became so precisely legible that I took tacit note even without A/Bs.


To underscore this just to be sure, the same cymbalic filigree got decidedly brushed under the carpet with my otherwise highly resolved Northstar USB dac32 and Benchmark DAC1. Ditto the attacks which the DAC8 rendered grippier, more to the point and exact without introducing a shade of unpleasant analysis. It simply sounded more effortless, less rough. The ARC thus specialized in a very non-pushy and nearly mild form of high precision. That was special and honestly a first for a digital source. It thus became a very fundamental character trait of the American DAC8.

The term ‘fine pored’ was just as fitting and first suggested itself with Oneida’s "Preteen Weaponry Pt II" from the eponymous year 2008 album. Across a broad swath of frequencies here the ARC impressed with the violently distorted sound eruptions which are so important to the song’s effect. Whilst admittedly a somewhat brachial example, it nicely demonstrated or ‘visualized’ the DAC8’s particular handling of such violence which other music often maintains as a mere undercurrent. The textural wealth of many stacked small distortions that make up these primordial volcanic eruptions suggested a particularly finely pored foam image when rendered by the DAC8.