Correct and for the ten years or so we built that platform that was the case and produced a world class beautiful sounding DAC. But, as you know, progress moves on. Always will.
After more than a decade of supporting that platform we felt it had reached its maximum potential. Indeed, there was more room on the FPGA to have offered some additional sonic magic, but the FPGA wasn’t what was limiting the technology’s potential. It was the follow on hardware configuration.
In this design chain, the output lvds of the FPGA went through a series of high speed video op-amps to increase its signal level, through a low pass filter, and then out through an audio transformer.
The signals themselves, based on lvds technology, were very low in level and once amplified had inherent noise which resulted in relatively poor measurement results in the -80dB range.
That’s when we reached a crossroads and chose to investigate an entirely new path, one still based on the core technology of a DSD stream converted directly into audio. The divergence is in what happens after the DSD signal is generated. As mentioned, in the DS MKII chain, the lvds output was further amplified and then LP filtered through an output transformer. In the new PMG Series, we take a very different path, one that not only sounds better but measured 20dB better as well.
The new path was quite a science project but worth the improvement.