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Storm Audio |
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Pandora DAC |
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Our first standalone DAC has been well worth the wait. HIAudio have had the pleasure of evaluating several, sent for us to try and evaluate over the last few of years, in the hope we would offer them to you the public. To date non have come up to scratch. Until now.
The Presentation of the new Pandora is quite Superb! The DAC is packaged in a machined Billet aluminium chassis, surprisingly small in size and weight. Build quality is excellent, with a very legible (and dimable) front panel display. The Menu structure we have found easy to use and has obviously been well thought out and the firmware developed by Storm Audio is excellent.
Overall Connectivity is first rate! The inclusion of balanced and single ended analogue outputs makes the Pandora a really versatile DAC and is unheard of in DACs around this price point to date.
The digital inputs are all high quality items and include both I2S and AES/EBU.
The more common SPDIF input is in our early models via a BNC adapter. Storm Audio have chosen BNC as its undeniable a better interface, but at the moment still used in the minority here in the UK (later models will have RCA SPDIF connections).
The supplied BNC to RCA adapter has no impact on performance, we have tried this as well as wiring onto the board a cable directly for comparison and interestingly there was no change.
Of greater interest is the inclusion of a USB input. This differentiates the Pandora from the competition. And although it will only got up to 48Khz, unlike the rest of the inputs that will all handle 96Khz and 24bit data streams.
Technically speaking The has a CD sync to provide a working clock for the CD transport/Media server.
Featuring dual high quality plastic enclosure transformer power supplies, which provide the separate power to both the DAC and the digital processing circuit. Each transformer features separate power regulation. A low noise shunt regulator is also applied to Each DAC chip, in total 14 voltage regulators are used in the Pandora.
To ensure total frequency accuracy the pandora has a two crystal clock one for 44.1khz and its factors, and the second for 48khz and its factors, making it compatible without correcting for any any input frequency group.
Built-in PLL (Phase locked loop) reclocking is used when the digital transport’s clock signal is too poor.
A Cirrus logic CS8414 and a precision line receiver are used in the circuit to ensure the signal from SPDIF is maintained before enter the receiver .
The Pandora is available with either 8 (or 16) Philips TDA1543 conversion chips which have been carefully examined and selected according to their measurement. The TDA1543 is a 16bit DAC which is originally designed for use in low end CD player and television set-top box, maybe once it was not a good choice, but today most semiconductor manufacturer have switched delta-sigma, which is originally a single bit conversion topology. It is therefore compatible with 24bit data, even though it is only a single bit chip.
So from an aesthetic and technical viewpoint the Pandora is spot on. Like Graham Slee phono stages the Pandora with its matching caps, takes time to run in and warm up. Used at Heathrow it was a times hard, now our demonstrator models with more than 28 days use have really started to sing. So ask your local retailer if a storm is coming there way, and then tell them to call HIAudio.