Chord Electronics DAVE DAC, Preamp, Headphone Amp

The Chord Electronics DAVE is the sort of digital component that makes you reconsider just how much information can be hiding in a recording. Developed from more than two decades of Chord’s digital research, it combines a reference-grade DAC, digital preamp and headphone amplifier in one rather striking package. The cleverness is largely hidden away inside its Spartan 6 FPGA, which handles an extraordinary amount of processing to deal with timing and conversion with remarkable precision. The result is a presentation that feels unusually clean and immediate, with excellent timing and a sense of realism that lets instruments occupy their own space without making the music feel clinical. There is detail aplenty, certainly, but DAVE’s real trick is how naturally that detail becomes part of the musical experience.

It is also refreshingly direct in operation. DAVE’s lossless digital volume control allows it to feed a power amplifier without the need for a separate preamp, while the built-in headphone stage makes it equally at home at the desk or in a serious listening system. The large porthole-style display, stainless-steel rotary controller and distinctive ball buttons give it the wonderfully eccentric Chord treatment, but there is genuine practicality behind the theatre. DAVE stands for ‘Digital to Analogue Veritas in Extremis’ — truth in extreme — and while that may sound rather grand, it gives you a fair idea of Chord’s ambition here. This is a component designed to get out of the way and let the recording speak, with very little between you and the music.