dCS Historians wanted

If you have been around dCS products for as long as I have ( or longer) i.e. probably from before the turn of the century, you may faintly remember the launch of a dCS product that seems to have not been successful and was very short lived.

It was built into a Delius case which, I believe, contained that DAC plus an unexpected ingredient. This was a phono stage which presumably provided sensitivity adjustment but then digitised the incoming analogue signal from the record player and fed it to the DAC ( and/or perhaps to the Purcell upsampler). I either recall or maybe guess (!) that RIAA EQ may have been carried out in the digital domain. Were other EQ curves available? I do not know the resolution that was used for the A/D conversion but this may also have been user selectable.

Here is my question: what it was called? It has been bugging me for ages. I assume that given the vintage it may have been given the name of a British composer.

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Have you looked at dCS timeline page, I might have thought every product they have done has been mentioned here?

https://www.dcsltd.co.uk/timeline/

Thanks but the timeline doesn’t mention every product. Only those they regard as milestones.

As I mentioned this one was unsuccessful. I know that there was at least one produced as I knew a dealer in Scotland who had one on demonstration - or to be more accurate, told me he had one.

Hi Pete, IIRC it was called the Grieg. Mike

Thank you so much. It was indeed. Airbrushed from history as they say.

That’s just fascinating. I wonder if, with the resurgence of vinyl, such a product might be more successful today.

Likely one of the drivers behind (Chord Electronics) Rob Watts’ DAVINA project; the A-to-D counterpart to his DAVE DAC.

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In a sense this products of this nature ( something with an ADC dedicated to vinyl replay) are common but only at the entry level for vinyl replay where many basic turntables have both analogue and digital (often Blue Tooth ) outputs. These appear to be mainly aimed at young people having their initial experience of LPs.

However when one moves to the market that dCS serves I doubt that there would be much call for a modern equivalent of the Greig ( which would currently be a Rossini with a phonostage ). This older, experienced and, lets face it, comparatively wealthy market will mostly have decided either to go 100% digital or are likely to have lifelong experience of vinyl replay and will have raised it to a high level.

For me ( as a continuing vinyl user) the likely failure of Greig seemed a no brainer at the time. It was too expensive for newcomers yet did not meet the needs or the ingrained attitude of dedicated vinyl users for whom digitising the output of their costly vinyl rig was anathema. For many vinyl is an alternative to digital with its own charms and drawbacks, not a substitute.

I think that for a lot of enthusiasts at the upper end of the market that attitude largely remains, rightly or wrongly. So if anyone at dCS is thinking along these lines then my advice would be to do market research in depth this time.

BTW the Greig did use that ADC to serve a couple of analogue line level inputs. That would be another topic altogether though the worldwide move from, say, analogue to digital broadcasting reduces the potential to use such inputs.

I found an interesting discussion about its attributes in AA archives dating from 2001:

As I think it through, you are correct of course. I knew about the cheap ADC options in the market. But I forget that the very concept of ADC is indeed “anathema” to true vinyl devotees. And yes, at the high end of the market, those folks will have acquired a way to preserve the analog chain all the way through to amplification.

High, it is called a Linn Urika II…

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@PAR

Try this rather amazing article that goes into a ton of detail about their history.

Thanks Sam. That is a good piece which I recall reading when Mono & Stereo published it. At the time M&S ran quite a few items about dCS. I think that it was around the time of the release of Vivaldi One, so 2017.

They also ran a series of , I think, 3 articles with accompanying videos each focussed on a different aspect of manufacturing the Vivaldi One nearly all of which ( aside from the optional gold finish :slightly_smiling_face:) is applicable to other dCS products . I have tried to find them in the archives without luck. It would be great if you were more successful than me and could provide links as I am sure that owners of other dCS products would be impressed by the standards adopted and have their understanding increased as to why dCS products are comparatively costly.

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Pete, the PDF of that 25 Year Story book can be found --> here (it contains more details than in that Mono & Stereo article). Also, there’s a dCS channel on Vimeo; https://vimeo.com/onlythemusic

Enjoy :wink:

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Thanks for those links. A delightful read.

Thanks for the links. Gosh the Vivaldi photographs well !

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