PS Audio PerfectWave Owner's Reference Manual - page 4
Introduction
®
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15-042-21-1 Rev A
Instruction i
©2010 PS Audio International Inc. All rights reserved.
The PS Audio PerfectWaveTM Digital To Analog Converter
(PWD) is a state-of-the-art D to A processor, preamplifier and
media center. The PWD accepts PCM Digital Audio data and
converts it to high-performance analog audio that can be fed
directly to a power amplifier or preamplifier.
Your PS Audio PWD represents a major advancement in the art
of recreating the musical event. The sense of being “there” at
the original performance, hearing the warmth and immediacy of
the live performance is unmatched. From the elegant physical
appearance to its superb construction, your PS Audio DAC will
provide you with years of musical enjoyment and pleasure.
The PerfectWave series is a system – designed to be used
together for best benefit - although each of the components
within that system can be used as standalone pieces.
The system’s philosophical beginnings centered on a somewhat
radical concept: that we could create a high-end digital audio
system that transcended the performance issues of storage,
media type and data delivery. We reasoned that all digital audio
data should provide the same level of performance regardless
of whether it was stored on optical discs, hard drives, solid
state memory or even, for that matter, over the internet.
After all, “bits-is-bits”. But we knew that “bits- aren’t- bits”
because they sounded differently; CD’s sounded different than
the same recording ripped to a hard drive, or streamed over
the internet. We knew that from a theoretical standpoint this
shouldn’t be and set out to design a system that transcended
these limitations. We first experimented with modified PC
motherboards and output cards to extract and manage the data
from both a hard drive and a ROM drive. These experiments
quickly convinced us that no PC equipment could be used as
their environments were too noisy and the peripherals (sound
cards and interfaces) measured well but relied on massive data
manipulation and sample rate conversion to achieve low jitter.
Had we stayed the course with using computer parts placed in
a nice high-end audio chassis, we would have been to market a
year earlier and competed with those manufacturers that have
chosen this route. But our goals were loftier than this and we
trudged onward from the ground-up with a custom solution
which you now are about to enjoy. No computer parts were
used in the building of this remarkable system.
The DAC you have in your possession is the first primary
piece in that system demonstrating this concept’s successful
conclusion. Two years in design and thousands of hours of
programming later we are pleased to present the world’s best
digital audio pieces.
Owner’s Reference
Perfect Wave DAC