DATA CONVERSION SYSTEMS – TURNING ZEROES AND ONES INTO EMOTIONS

I am a MASSIVE fan of the late and quite miserable git that was Frank Zappa. He made a lot of music about American hypocrisy after an early experience of being criminalised for making a porny-sounding and quite silly record. Now Frank was not one for love, only finding it mattered as he lay on his death bed. He lived for his work and was said to be as talented as Beethoven when it came to complex arrangements for dozens of instruments. He was a rock orchestrator. And oh boy was he a stickler for technical and awesome production. He would over dub and rework live recordings until they were high art and was a tough task master to work for.

But Frank committed an act of deep vandalism upon his own work by binning all the analogue master tapes of his entire catalogue, as he had taken it on face value that CD’s digital resolution was the best his music could ever sound. We now know that to be sadly untrue and also that analogue tapes caught and recorded more information than we ever realised and that careful remastering of ancient analogue material can be beyond worthy, revealing detail we hadn’t heard before.
But the real issue was always that digital flicker-book with the new era of music – turning the zeroes and ones back into tunes that can make you get goose bumps or weep. The sample rates and bit depth of digital music, be it transposed from analogue in the first place or recorded in deep digits, has ebbed and flowed with different systems down the years. Some better and some awful. I for one could not have been happier to learn very recently that MP3 is effectively dead, with no more licences to be granted. MP3 was a massive leap backwards in sound quality that’s taken a long time to get beyond. That we now have a lunatic frontier of fighting file formats is sad in some ways, awesome in others.

Yet throughout that time, a very specific outfit, called dCS for Digital Conversion Systems, has quietly been getting on with the REAL issue. And that’s turning the digits of all the codecs and formats from AAC to Zog-code, back into music again. The dCS folks started with military radar, so the frequencies of the audio spectrum were deemed easy by comparison. I won’t go into one about their history but they are now a second-generation family-led company and are recognised worldwide as being the best. I was invited to a recent press day at dCS but have had to wait until midnight on day one of the Munich High End show to reveal the video I made on May The Fourth (below) as there is a sensitive unit shown in it, that is being launched at the show on May 18th. I apologise for the opening credits.

One thing I can tell you, is that their digital clock products are used by the BBC and that most of their posh DACs fly off around the world to well-heeled audio fans in the Far East especially. The sound of those speakers and the clarity, detail and purity of the music we were played was staggering.
link