Lina upgrade to 2.0 possibly?

[Anupc (Anup)]

@vahifiguy

However, I couldn’t help but notice that there hasn’t been much specific mention of the impact that using a clock has on DSD upscaling.

Quite right. I don’t think anyone’s focused too much on the impact of external clocking on DSD Upsampling. dCS obviously has different DSD filters that noise-shape differently, since SNR is proportional to jitter, the different filters will have varying jitter performance as well. Nevertheless, according to that HiFiNews review, even the DSD F1 filter’s highest jitter is only at just over -120dBFS.

@vahifiguy

Additionally, I haven’t seen any mention of the Bartok Apex being used in conjunction with a clock yet.

I don’t think there are too many Bartok Apex units out in the field yet

@vahifiguy

Regarding the Lina, I was also surprised that it didn’t come out as an Apex device from the get-go,

Unlike the rest of the dCS family which have the DAC board thats separate from the Control-board. Lina has a combined Control/DAC board, so Apex upgrades on Lina will be tricky at best.

@vahifiguy

There’s definitely a need for a fix for the filter-switching issue

What’s the filter-switching issue?

Did you mean the muting relay-clicks during source bit-rate change - which is a normal behaviour of dCS DACs. It’s described in the following post from James:

New Lina Questions/Issue/Clicking sounds

Hi Anthony, That clicking noise is the relays inside the DAC, which work to fully mute the output of the DAC when there are changes to the DSP chain that would otherwise cause audible clicks or pops to come through the headphones. Things like sample rate changes in the content you are playing are a good example of this. So basically, the click is when the DAC performs a ‘hard mute’ where a ‘soft mute’ (done in the software of the unit) is not enough to stop pops coming through the headphones. …