John Darko
Musical Fidelity has this week added two new products to its flagship Nu-Vista range: the Nu-Vista Vinyl 2 phono pre-amplifier and the Nu-Vista DAC. We’re honing in on the latter today.
Per other Nu-Vista models, the newly-minted DAC is housed in a “super heavy and super rigid” chassis and gets its name from the deployment of a quad of (7586) NuVista tubes which, according to Musical Fidelity “…were invented in the 1950s to solve the many shortcomings of conventional tubes. Unlike them, Nuvistor tubes offer very high reliability, low microphony, low noise, consistency from batch to batch, small size, relatively low power consumption and great technical performance.”
Working this D/A converter’s engine room is a pair of ESS Labs Sabre ES9038Q2M. Not the 9038PRO but the 9038Q2M. This is precisely where SINAD-sniffers turning their noses up at Musical Fidelity’s choice of silicone will come unstuck. For they will ignore the Nu-Vista DAC’s fully balanced circuitry – which extends to the XLR sockets on the back panel – and they won’t give a second thought to the all-discrete Class A output stage (no op-amps!) and the large ‘Super Silent Power Transformer’ that juices the whole device. They will bypass talk of power regulation and filtering to remain deaf to just how much a DAC’s output stage, power supply and circuit topology can influence its sound quality.
Ditto the upsamplers and digital filters, which have also been custom-designed by Musical Fidelity’s engineers. From the press release: “Digital audio is the art of time, with our proprietary clock design we have managed jitter rates of unrivalled and below 100 femtoseconds. This outperforms many renowned and respected audiophile clock generators!”
The Nu-Vista supports 32bit/768kHz PCM, MQA and native DSD up to DSD512 via a range of digital inputs: USB, coaxial, AES/EBU, 3 x TOSLINK and the audiophile catnip that is an I2S HDMI socket. The larger multi-pin inputs are for the addition of Musical Fidelity’s ‘Uni’ outboard power supply.
Retail EU pricing on the Nu-Vista DAC has been set at €10,990. Your choice of black or silver.
Further information: Musical Fidelity
