COMPUTER AUDIO DESIGN (CAD)
Teaming up with Boenicke Audio once again at the 2016 Munich Hi End Show, I found the sound and the visual appearance irresistible. I recognise that not everybody wants ugly audio in their home anymore and was delighted at the way in which I could see Sven Boenicke’s beautiful speakers and the CAD line blending into tasteful homes.
It is difficult to make the electronics, the “black box” look sexy but the finish on the CAD is splendid and I am promised Ivory and Gold coloured enclosures for the Asian market. What CAD brings to audio is “cutting edge” and executed with great care. It allows people to listen to music from the comfort of their chair, controlling the music on an iPad or iPhone. It allows the vast catalogues of high resolution music that is now available to be delivered into the home in a graceful and elegant way. If anyone doubts that this is now possible, they should have been at the 2016 Munich room with Boenicke and CAD. It was not just me, there were lots of people with enthusiasm written all over their faces! We welcome CAD to Audio Evidence.
CAD CAT
The new CAT is our highly advanced source component. It has been carefully designed to complement our award-winning 1543 DAC, combining exceptional sound quality with ease of use to provide a high-quality one-box solution for music storage and playback. Each CAT is built by hand to order here in the UK and is tailored to suit your home music set-up: either as a stand-alone two-channel system, or for integration into home networks.
CAD 1543 MKII DAC
The world’s finest dedicated USB digital-to-analogue convertor has been upgraded. Computer Audio Design has announced a refit to its unique CAD 1543 DAC, now using proprietary EMI/RFI reduction materials, improved DAC circuit boards, single-crystal UP-OCC internal wiring and refined power supply filtering, to create the CAD 1543 MKII DAC.It retains the key technologies that contribute to a performance lifted far above normal expectations for digital audio, leading with the innovative use of prized vintage resistor-ladder DAC chipsets, and the daring removal of the standard digital interpolation filter.
CAD is one of a handful of digital audio companies offering resistor-ladder DAC technology, along with no oversampling and no filtering, which CAD believes offers a distinctively different sound than most digital audio products on the market today – a sound that is tangibly closer to the original performance.
CAD GC1 GROUND CONTROL
The Ground Control contains a mixture of materials that converts high frequency energy into heat. Most audio engineers put a lot of effort into making sure the positive and negative rails of their DC power supplies have low ripple and noise, adequate bandwidth, etc. but typically not much thought is put into the signal ground plane.
The CAD GC1 Ground Control can be connected to any audio product that has an unused output or input connection. If your DAC, streamer, computer, phone stage, preamplifier, amplifier, CD Player, NAS, etc. has a spare output/input connector like an RCA, XLR, Spade, USB or Ethernet you can connect the GC1 Ground Control to that. We supply a range of interconnects with various connectors. The other end of the interconnect has a single or double 4mm banana plug that attaches to the GC1 Ground Control.