Music

Music

• Player: Foobar
• Output: ASIO and Direct sound
• Media: Flac Lossless files (16/44.1 and 24/96)

We decided to test many different genres of music to look for the devices strong and weak points. All of our test music is made up of lossless audio tracks in the form of Flac compressed audio files.

We found this device to have a very neutral signature as the device seemed to produce no obvious coloration of the tested tracks.  The device has a very large, accurate soundstage in which it was easy to locate instruments and other aspects of the tested tracks. Here are some details from a couple tracks out of the large amount we tested.

The Rolling Stones - Beggars Banquet
Track: Sympathy for the Devil

This is a very layered tracks with various aspects going on in the mix.  The A1 keep all aspects from becoming mud while keeping them intrinsic to the song.  These older tracks are great for testing as they have more dynamic range then much of the compressed mess floating around these days.

The bass was big and full yet not muddied or mushed into the backing tracks.  This song gets you be bopping on this device.

Eminem - Relapse
I love the way you lie Ft/ Rihanna

This sings has awesome bass and the A1 does a good job of reproducing it without bottoming out.  The vocal tracks are an excellent contrast for testing.  The A1 produces this song in great fashion with no smearing of the aspects or excess coloration just great tunes.

We will not waste pages describing what we heard using this DAC and our favorite music and test tracks we just wanted to impart that fact that the A-1 DAC produces music outside of its price range.

Movies
Usually we prefer surround sound for movies but for these tests we did use the Dolby Headphone routine which offered virtual surround sound through the A-1 DAC.  We noticed no obvious anomalies or issue with the soundstage or signature in either stereo or virtual surround mode with headphones.  This DAC produce clear articulate audio for the test DVDs.

Gaming
For gaming we connected this DAC to the CL TitaniumHD through S/Pdif which allowed us to have all the gaming features of the TitaniumHD for our tests but use the PurePiper A-1 as the output digital converter. 

Generally in these gaming tests we are looking for issues with the imaging or missing effects or other anomalies.  This DAC worked great in this type of system in both stereo and virtual surround modes using THX routines on the source.  FPS are usually our games of choice and the A-1 did an excellent job producing the various aspects.