I am in the camp that well understands that offering a feature like DSD256 is significantly more complicated than merely pressing a few buttons. And that it would utilize finite resources. I suspect most of our members here are well aware of that. However, this statement is not entirely true, and while I don’t want to derail this thread from its purpose of discussing the Bartok Apex review, it’s worth mentioning that PS Audio’s Direct Stream DAC, also a FPGA architecture, didn’t start out with 256DSD. It got there through upgrades. And they were free. As for “latest model,” that may be true in a technical sense, but for many DAC makers, the list also includes “the latest model’s predecessor, and its predecessor, and the predecessor before that, etc.” MSB has had it on its current models, several of which have been on offer for years. This isn’t “the latest thing.” It is officially old hat.
I’m not sure why this distinction should matter very much, as our excellent dCS representatives have acknowledged that the current architecture has adequate horsepower for the playback. In fact, calling out that distinction strikes me as providing more support for the upgrade, not less, because features of this type are part of the selling point of FPGA architecture. “Most other makers can’t do this; we can!”
Customers are in fact asking for this. Some have said they wouldn’t put it first on their list; I would always vote for better SQ, but the explanations of why those two features keep being positioned as competitive seem fairly thin to me. We’ve now been talking about this for over two years. In that time, the DSD256+ library has continued to grow. The communities external to our community have grown a bit louder in their criticism of the feature’s absence. I would now put the question another way:
Since the ability to provide significant upgrades is a touted feature of the FPGA architecture, and that architecture is both a selling point and significant SQ aspect of the system, why not deliver on one of the upgrades that the customers want and of which the system is capable?
It may not be important to everyone (not all features are), but its potential (system upgrade) is part of the raison d’être of the product design. DCS put that in stark relief with this week’s release of Lina 1.1:
If we talk anymore about this, it should probably be over in that DSD256 Feature Request thread. This is definitely not about the Bartok Apex review.