We have a very fast transformer-coupled output that maintains the integrity of the signal while giving the proper output impedance. We could probably design a better interface for just Theta equipment, but in order to work well with a really wide range of equipment, we were forced to optimize the industry standard.
I was impressed by how substantial it is. Sinclair: Its digital processing section is similar to the Gen. We do use some standard elements —we use a Crystal [ chip] like many other people do — but we do unique things with our phase-locked loop, and to control jitter.
Our reconstruction filters are unique. We found that adding certain amounts of dither at select frequencies improved the linearity of the DAC—which means the listener hears an amazing amount of low level detail and decay. White: Exactly—all from noise that is supposedly below the level of audibility.
It has all kinds of noise and other distortions occurring but it does that right because you can hear down into the noise-floor—easily. The ear can hear an event occurring way down into that noise. So while analog has its problems it gets that part right.
For the first time were approaching that with digital. The PLL filter is another area where Theta has done a lot of work. It has major sonic implications in imaging. Things are much more clearly defined, and the spaces between them are blacker. What the circuit does is take an incoming dock signal and compare it to the outgoing signal.
For normal discs — which is still most of them—we feel pretty secure about our own filters. People don t even agree as to which discs are better. After all this time, there are still only about 25 HDCD-encoded discs. We did feel that we should make it available, though, to give customers a choice. It would cost consumers a lot. White: Not to mention all the sub-standards of coax.
Digital is already confusing enough to most people. The output impedance was an extremely low 14 ohms single-ended and 28 ohms balanced.
This combination of high output level and low output impedance makes the DS Pro Basic III ideal for driving a power amplifier through a passive attenuator.
Although the processor locked to 32kHz and 48kHz sampling frequencies, it produced a distorted waveform when processing 32kHz data. The response is ruler-flat, with only a slight rolloff at 20kHz. Crosstalk fig. The noise level is low the trace of second harmonic distortion seen in many processors in this test is almost non-existent, and only a hint of power-supply noise can be seen in the audio signal the tiny bump at Hz.
A wideband spectral analysis fig. The 1kHz difference component; here buried well below dB, usually protrudes into the dB range. Note the absence of signal- correlated jitter components, which would be seen as spikes in the trace. Although free from periodic jitter components, the RMS jitter level measured at the 8x clock pin was a highish ps. The RMS level dropped to ps when the unit was processing a signal of all zeros, but rose back to ps with a 1kHz, —90dB sinewave input.
The three traces all looked similar, suggesting that the DS Pm Basic III has a good ability to reject incoming jitter; although its intrinsic jitter is moderately high.
Higher levels of jitter are tolerable if that jitter is random rather than having a specific frequency. Dimensions: 19W by 3. The details are not something to ignore either as this is another chapter where this old theta shines. You can hear subtle things in the scene, like the movements of the artists, or their breath. But this also extends to instruments and voices which just let more sound get to you. The imaging is very good showing very good precision.
The soundstage seemed natural to me, with good depth, but I felt that it would need a little more width. This R2R dac has a neutral sound signature.
Both voices and instruments have very detailed and quite natural textures. Wood sounds like wood, metal sounds like metal, etc. Tape decks Tuners View All Analog.
Solid state Tube View All Integrateds. You can even select, and change, the quality level of your digital to analog conversion. It can also be configured to perform digital domain surround sound processing. There is also a high end video switching option. Casablanca can be operated by remote control or by buttons on its faceplate. Casablanca is easy to use.
Both the LCD front panel and the on-screen video display offer information and choices of various functions and selections of surround modes. For Dolby 5. The mother board provides signal routing and the daughter boards contain the actual circuitry. Casablanca can be expanded, changed and upgraded by changing daughter cards, which is very easy to do. Writing the software for these systems turned out to be very tricky, difficult and time consuming. There were things that needed to be smoothed out before Casablanca was ready to go out in the world.
Casablanca turned into a major programming project with complications unforeseen in the optimistic design phases. The engineer who took over software development continued to be optimistic, though. As a result, Theta placed Casablanca advertisements for about a year before any were finally made available. By the time Casablanca came to market in , it had acquired more options and capabilities. Notably, it offered a phase-perfect electronic crossover, of great value in fine-tuning overall sonic balance to the peculiarities of room acoustics, and fully balanced circuit options became available.
Parts quality was uniformly exceptional. The analog volume control was a tour-de-force in high-quality discrete resistors. Extensive shielding of signal paths, power supplies and digital RF noise sources from each other, and multiple, high-grade power supplies made the Casablanca quite a hefty piece. Casa Nova was developed as a less expensive version of Casablanca.
Casa Nova was introduced in November of Casablanca II was the recipient of a great many improvements on the original Casablanca, and all of the updates necessary to keep pace with current technology and standards for sound processing.
Perhaps the most significant improvement was that the Casablanca II simply sounded better than the original. Some innovations in the II version were new and different enough to call for particular attention. Theta had originated several unique features and modes that no other company could offer. Center Power Redistribution CPR corrected for theater sound mixes, which bunched up much of the sound in the center channel — great for a vast theater, but terrible in a home environment where the center channel was often the weakest.
CPR enhanced the quality and dynamic range of sound while making much better use of the best speakers. A Party Mode generated a sum of all channels, which was added to the signal going to each speaker.
Circle Surround was an option that made it possible to produce a convincing multichannel sound field from any stereo two-channel source. Ideally, there should have been a Casablanca II available sometime in the years between the first and second versions.
By the time Casablanca II was ready, it was clearly not something the average consumer could be expected to know how to set up for optimal performance. Theta announced to dealers and distributors worldwide that each dealer and distributor would be required by Theta to have their key technical staff members attend training seminars offered at the factory, at trade shows, or in classes Theta held in Europe for those not traveling to the US. Despite a flurry of exasperated calls from both domestic dealers and overseas distributors, Theta flatly refused to ship a Casablanca II to any location not thoroughly factory-trained.
Digital volume control is simple to implement, but at a cost. Losing this information means that the quality of sound deteriorates; as you lower the volume level, the quality of sound becomes worse and worse. Casablanca I kept all the resolution there was, even when one turned the sound down to a whisper.
Circle Surround provided realistic surround environments from two-channel music recordings. Accurate surround sound signals based on the stereo information in the recording provided a musical experience with sonic integrity, which allowed you to believe in what you were hearing.
Circle Surround also created a believable front soundstage, apportioning the stereo signal more comfortably across your three front channel speakers. This made your Home cinema system music-friendly in a way that it otherwise would not have been. Circle Surround was clearly the preferred mode for music listening. Most other implementations of Circle Surround were done in the analog domain. Encoded was for use with material encoded with the Circle Surround 5.
Think about how movies are mixed, with all the dialogue and most of the important stuff steered toward the center speakers. Sure, that makes lots of sense in a theater, because most people are sitting well off center axis. Now visualize the home theater system with some rinky-dink center channel, perhaps hidden away behind the screen or lurking in some credenza. The poorest sounding speaker in a home system is given the most critical tasks!
What CPR did was get the stereo speakers involved. This made all kinds of sense from the perspective of power distribution think of the power handling capability of those poor little center channels , so it opened up the dynamic range, and greatly enhanced the overall sound quality.
Introduced in , this tool greatly assisted set-up of Casa Nova. You could save and then reinstall any number of complete setups. CASTLE made it fast and simple for you to experiment with different setups, to make your Casa Nova easier for you and your whole family to use.
You could also experiment with different crossover settings to improve the sound of your whole system. You could do all this knowing that it was easy to get back to your original settings whenever you wanted to. Your dealer may have offered to store your default system setup in his computer. This could have turned a potential house-call into a phone call! All changes were in real time, so you could monitor the programming as it took place.
For instance, there was a layout of all speaker crossover choices, which made the choosing process intuitively logical. You could enter audio and video jack names and input select button names for both LCD and On Screen Display by simply typing them in. Sonic excellence resulted from a myriad of interrelated factors; improvements in sound resulted from overall improvements of many different kinds:.
In comparison with most other ready-made, preprogrammed digital filter chips it was a definite improvement. This was because most of the other available off-the-shelf digital conversion programs were simply inadequate, by audiophile standards, to do anything but a rudimentary, unsatisfactory job.
Perfect in phase, frequency and time, Theta offered performance literally an order of magnitude beyond the power of all but a tiny handful of extremely expensive processors. Listeners sensed a graceful, inviting effortlessness. Most CD reproduction seemed stressful. Theta listeners found themselves drawn into the music.
Theta had always concentrated on doing digital signal processing, pressing the boundaries to derive the finest analog music signals possible, and left it to others to amplify them. It seemed reasonable to assume that those same great designers at those audiophile-oriented companies would take up the challenges of multi-channel sound, and provide what was needed.
What actually happened instead seems to have been a lot of compromises and lowered standards. Two kinds of multi-channel amplifiers came into being, both presuming that standards for home theater amplification are not very demanding.
Many multi-channel amplifiers were available from companies that did not make music-oriented amplifiers. For music, these amplifiers were highly uninspiring, but they were considered acceptable for home theater. Yet in comparison with their own high-end stereo amplifiers these sounded lackluster and pallid.
The reasons were mysterious. Granted, multi-channel amplifiers were designed to take price into account. It was tempting to reason that there was a natural enmity between quality and quantity. Where was a multi-channel amplifier that took musical performance seriously? Baffled that no one else was meeting this need, Theta set to work in new terrain.
A number of radical ideas went into development, notably a foray into the elimination of global negative feedback. This work evolved into the Dreadnaught power amplifier, which began shipping in early The Dreadnaught was not a compromise. It was not a downgrade of any pre-existing two-channel design.
Dreadnaught was conceived and created from the ground up to deliver flexibility and performance; and met needs that simply had not been met before. Home Theater amplifiers were generally right at the borderline of offering sufficient power. Each Dreadnaught channel was rated at watts into 8 Ohms, into 4, and even more into 2 Ohms. Dreadnaught could be a two-channel amplifier, or loaded with up to five channels, each with enough power to properly do home theater.
The Two-Channel Module made it possible for the Dreadnaught to generate up to 10 channels of fully balanced power amplification. These modules could be combined with single-channel modules, extending the flexibility of the Dreadnaught still further.
With multichannel formats exceeding the conventional 5. The Yamaha decoder extracts the clock information from the signal with an internal phase-locked loop PLL , strips out the subcode, demultiplexes left and right audio, and sends the data to the next processing stage. The wire carrying the digital data stream from the RCA input jack to the digital board was carefully chosen for its sonic virtues. This low-propagation delay wire was suggested by Dave Magnan, maker of the highly regarded Magnan Type V interconnects.
According to Mike Moffat's listening tests, even this short 3" piece of wire carrying ones and zeros affects the processor's sound. Other design aspects of the DSPro Basic include careful attention to timing relationships and clock signals to avoid jitter, an input circuit to keep RF out, and minimizing ground-plane noise. Footnote 1: A TO package can be identified by its metal plate to which a plastic square has been attached, hole at the top for a heatsink, and three pins protruding from the bottom.
A TO-3 package is a round metal container a little bigger than a quarter, most often used for output transistors. NEXT: Page 2 ». Log in or register to post comments. Related Latest Galleries Recommended. Dirac Live 3 room-correction software. The Mod Squad Tiptoes. Quicksilver MS power amplifier. January Classical Record Reviews. January Jazz Record Reviews. January Rock Record Reviews. ReTales Prices and patience.
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