Bryston BDA-1 D/A Converter
I’ve been using the Musical Fidelity V-DAC for a while now and I’ve been mightily impressed using a Mac as a source for a hi-fi system. So I thought I’d try the Bryston BDA-1 DAC. At first glance it doesn’t look like much for £2k+ unit. There are 10 buttons, a bunch of LEDs and that’s about your lot, however, I like how understated it looks. On the rear of the DAC it has 2 optical, 4 SPDIF, 1 AES and 1 USB input connections + 1 SPDIF output with balanced and unbalanced audio outputs. Build quality as ever with Bryston hardware is exceptional. Annoyingly for a product at this price, the remote is an optional extra at, in my opinion, a ridiculous price, I’ve been using a Logitech Harmony One mutlifunction remote instead.
The DAC offers synchronous upsampling so 32k, 48k or 96 are upsampled to 192k and 44.1k or 88.2k are upsampled 176.4k. When the DAC is upsampling to the former, the upsample light shows in green, the latter in amber. The DAC also allows upsampling to be switched in and out so the user can choose the sound they prefer.
After I plugged the USB output of my Mac into the DAC, note the DAC must be switched off when you do this, the DAC instantly locked to the 48k output from it. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the sound as I’ve been impressed with the VDAC and wasn’t sure if the Bryston would be able to really make a PC sound much better. From the first note, this was obviously not the case. The sound coming from my iTunes library was now at least on par with my Audionet CD player. It was in a word, stunning. Everything about the sound was impressive, the bass is deep, controlled and solid, treble became sweet but still with the required bite from cymbals and snares. Female vocals seem to flow out of the speakers with loads of depth and width in the soundstage for the rest of the instruments. Somehow there is an inky blackness behind music that really emphasizes the instruments and performers. It could be psychosomitic, but it sounds to me that as this is just data from a hard disk, there isn’t the mechanical noise or jitter caused by a spinning CD and the Bryston plays to this strength.
I’ve spent some time switching the upsampling in and out and there is a slight difference, however both are enjoyable and to be honest works better on some albums than others. If anything it can sound ever so slightly artificial when upsampled.
After spending time with the BDA-1, I’d be happy to use this as my main source of music and not have a CD player in my system at all. Giving that it has plenty of other inputs for an existing CD player/DAB tuner/streaming device etc this an amazing product. Even at this price I’d class it as a bit of a bargain.
May 7th, 2010 at 11:44 AM
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