4826 Sterling Drive, Boulder, CO 80301
PH: 720.406.8946 [email protected] www.psaudio.com
Introduction iii
®
©2014 PS Audio Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Owner’s Reference
DirectStream DAC
The PS Audio PerfectWave™ DirectStream Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) is a state-
of-the-art DAC, preamplifier and media center. DirectStream accepts PCM as well as
DSD Digital Audio data and converts it to high-performance analog audio that can be
fed directly to a power amplifier or preamplifier.
DirectStream represents a major advancement in the art of recreating the musical event.
Musical information that may have previously been hidden (or covered up by other
DACs) in digital audio media ranging from CDs to high resolution downloads will be
uncovered by DirectStream.
Subtle musical details and cues such as upper harmonics, decay, reverb and room
reflections will no longer be masked by the conversion process from digital to analog.
Your music will sound natural and you will be able to rediscover much of what you may
have been missing in your digital audio library with the introduction of DirectStream into
your system.
DirectStream features a unique architecture inside. From its digital inputs to its passive
output stage, DirectStream has been hand written, hand designed and personally
voiced by its principal designer, Ted Smith, along with PS Audio CEO Paul McGowan
and legendary loudspeaker designer and founder of Infinity Loudspeaker Systems,
Arnie Nudell.
DirectStream is based on a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) as its core
processor and no off-the-shelf DAC chips are used in its design.
DirectStream is less sensitive to the vagaries of input source types and their level of
jitter than most DACs made. Remarkably low jitter sensitivity is one of the hallmarks of
this design and accomplished by not using classic edge transition detection techniques
used on the digital input data. Instead, a proprietary method of extremely fast sample-
and-recognize technology is employed that reduces dependency on cables, jitter and
the quality of the incoming data source.
Once the data from the selected digital audio source has been input to DirectStream
it is upsampled to ten times the standard DSD rate of 2.8MHz before any processing
takes place. After processing by DirectStream all input data is converted to double
rate DSD (5.6MHz) and output through a passively filtered analog section consisting
primarily of a high-quality audio output transformer. Elimination of the classic active
analog output stage, with all its difficulties running at these high frequencies, have been
implemented with a high quality passive audio transformer.
Welcome
DirectStream
overview
