Irresistible Thompson
One other thing: please forgive the absence of catalogue
numbers after the songs. Nearly all my material used during the listening
sessions came via hard-drive, and neither Fidelia nor iTunes shows these
numbers. Suffice it to say, they're all recordings you can easily find. Sue
Thompson's nauseatingly infectious ‘Norman' from 1961 is the kind of teeth-
jarringly cute song that either has you in poptastic rapture or drives you from
the room. It sounds like it was arranged by a guy who conducted circus bands
back in the days when the act of antagonising elephants and tigers was an
acceptable form of family entertainment.
You get jangly guitar stage-right and fart-y trombone stage
left, underscored by the most monotonous drumming ever laid down on tape. And
Thompson's voice? Country warbler, tweaked by helium. I love it, in the way I
can't resist cherry cola, caramel corn and the entire ABBA canon.
Like an external
hard-drive, the Denon comes with feet and a stand, so you can use it flat, or
vertically. Source select is soft-touch; standby uses a button, while volume is
via a rotary control
Denon treated it like a parent dealing with a wilful child:
the sugar content remained, but a layer of rather ‘un-digital' silkiness
somehow rendered it more palatable ... or perhaps ‘less unpalatable.' Quite a
trick, but I wouldn't play this song for the sort of people who still pierce
effigies of Joe Dolce.
Denon's magic - love the song or hate it - is in rendering
the instruments as real-sounding. OK, so the original is pure analogue,
recorded for the Nashville-based Hickory Records back in the days when stereo
was wide, Country & Western was undiluted redneck fodder, and digits was
another word for ‘fingers'. Those old C&W recordings are fabulous. For a
52-year-old recording, the sound is vivid, and the DA-300USB reproduced it with
snap and verve.
Same with The Sensations' ‘Let Me In', a mono extravaganza
from '62, with similarly repetitious, all-snare drumming, but with doo-wop
backing vocals adding sublime depth. Again, a song as irresistible as a Mexican
Wave in a stadium, with a sax break in the middle that leaps from one's
speakers.
Self-evident
sockets, so no need for the owner’s manual: RCA phono line-out, one coax, one
USB and two optical digital inputs, with DC power via a wall-wart
All held together
It was uncanny playing this through headphones: while the
Denon's headphone amp isn't the most powerful I've heard - it got nothing from
Sennheiser HD414s but worked reasonably well with Focal's Classic and B&W's
P5 - the bulk of the music occupied a single point, with an impression of the
sax somehow being in front. Frontal lobe, perhaps. Consistency? Perfect, no
elements overpowering any others.
For detail, from the same era, I used ‘Palisades Park',
replete with calliope-like keyboards and the sound of a rollercoaster. Freddy
Cannon didn't so much sing this as snarl it, but it is impossible not to move
along with it. Also mono, it's a smorgasbord of little effects, which makes one
beg for a stereo version if detail retrieval is a priority. But I heard myriad
little touches amidst the raucous mayhem, including subtle traces of echo,
screaming revellers and other contributors to a fairground atmosphere.
Because the recording is state-of- the-art, I used Tom
Jones' ‘Delilah' [The Golden Hits 1969 compendium - Deram] repeatedly to assess
both the differing inputs and varying sampling rates at source. Let's cut to
the chase: there's nothing in it. You can connect this with aplomb to any of
the inputs, perhaps determining the choice not by the Denon, but by the quality
of the source. Using identical material, from a MacBook Air and an iMac, the
former sounded better than the latter, more convincing and marginally richer.
The Denon is
better-looking, nicer to use and just as clever
That was not the Denon's doing, but the computers'
behaviour. Lab Report points out that the Denon's responses are
content-sensitive, but we can do nothing about that, because the recording is
the recording, period.
With ‘Delilah', there's a massive orchestra behind an
equally massive voice, sweeping background vocals and sufficient strings to
excite upper frequency irritation - to call it ‘overwhelming' is
understatement. But the Denon held it all together, and the sound earns my
favourite accolade, ‘impressive'.
This is a superlative DAC, period. OK, I was underwhelmed by
the headphone section, but that is not a terminal issue, just because it may
have spurned the HD414s, whereas the B&Ws were a delicious match. Far more
importantly, it processed The Beatles' catalogue transferred from the legendary
24-bit ‘Apple USB' with utter elegance.
Verdict
Clear-cut though you'd like this to be, Denon versus NAD is
not an issue easy to resolve. The almost identically sized NAD is $117 dearer,
but you get balanced outputs and one more input. The Denon is better-looking,
nicer to use and just as clever. Am I copping out? Maybe: I have a NAD on my
desk, but will sorely miss the Denon. I'm just glad I don't have to choose
between 'em. It's as close as Coke and Pepsi.
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Specifications
·
Maximum output level (Balanced): 2.40Vrms at 295ohm
·
A-wtd S/N ratio (S/PDIF / USB): 109.1dB / 110.2dB
·
Distortion (1kHz, 0dBFs/-30dBFs): 0.0025% / 0.0015%
·
Dist. & Noise (20kHz, 0dBFs/-30dBFs): 0.0085% / 0.0020%
·
Freq. resp. (20Hz-20kHz/45kHz/90kHz): +0.0dB to
-0.3dB/-2.6dB/-10.4dB
·
Digital jitter (48kHz/96kHz/USB): 145psec / 180psec / 11psec
·
Resolution @ -100dB (S/PDIF / USB): ±0.3dB / ±0.2dB
·
Power consumption: 8W (1W standby)
·
Dimensions (WHD): 170x57x182mm
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