Table of Contents
Advertisement
Unique Technology - the past and the future
In the 1980's early DACs were all 16 bit ladder DACs, with a precision laser-trimmed resistor creating the appropriate analog level for
each of the bits. The DACs worked well and sounded good. They were quite expensive as very accurate resistors were required. Then
along came the "single bit" DACs. Rather than using a resistor to create an analog level, pulse width modulation was used. Basically
each bit was created by turning a switch on and off for the appropriate length of time. The resulting square wave pattern was filtered
to create a smooth output. The expensive resistors were gone, and so was the good performance. Next came the Delta Sigma DAC. It
used the same pulse width modulation but rather than creating a single large pulse for each data point, the data point was created with
many small pulses. This allows the pulses to be smoothed with a
less radical filter, and that approach became the basis of essentially
all the DACs on the market for the next 20 years.
But MSB instead drew from the older, superior ladder technology,
and continued to make incredible improvements over the years.
Discrete high precision Ladder DACs were built, and later replaced
by Sign Magnitude Ladder DACs. Precision has been increased as
well as output power.
Today the HYBRID DAC used in the SELECT allows the DAC
to drive the output directly with no opamp or output stage by
implementing 16 parallel DAC channels! This is a first in the
industry.
Organization of the Users Manual
The SELECT has many special features and can be broken down into 5 basic parts. Each has a section as well as the operation manual.
They follow the signal flow:
Inputs --> Clock --> Digital processing and DACs --> Outputs --> Power Supplies
page 6
page 9
page 10
page 10
page 11
page 15
page 18
4
Original Platinum DAC module
The SELECT contains
8 two channel HYBRID
DAC modules, a total of 16
channels.
Hide quick links:
Advertisement
Table of Contents
