Years ago, more horsepower meant getting under the hood and bolting on some parts.

Today, I get the engine management EPROM reflashed to achieve more horsepower.  And so it goes with digital audio.  While some may question the logic of a four-box digital audio player that still plays physical media, today just underscored why the dCS Paganini is worth the money I’ve invested in it.  It’s modular design makes it obsolete-proof.

Rather than having to take a bath on selling the Pag to get the newest thing from dCS, they sent me a pair of CD’s to upgrade the software in the Upsampler and DAC portions of my Paganini stack, which consists of a Transport, (for SACD and CD discs) the DAC, an upsampler and a word clock.

The whole process took about 40 minutes per box and the instructions were straightforward.  The result?  Being ever skeptical of digital, I was shocked at how much of an improvement took place.  Of course more listening will be required, but immediately there was a much bigger spatial perspective, with more clarity from the top to the bottom of the frequency spectrum and a huge layer of midrange cloudiness that I didn’t know existed is now gone.

It’s sounding a LOT closer to my analog rig.