NuWave DSD Released

What product uncovers treasure long buried in CDs, plays DSD files, has an I2S input, and helps music from any digital source come alive? The NuWave DSD, our latest DAC. Affordable, beautiful and great sounding, this newest addition is built in Boulder, designed by a brilliant engineer and begins shipping today.
The NuWave DSD has been a personal project of our chief engineer, Bob Stadtherr. He’s labored long to build the best sounding under $2,000 DAC he can and I am wowed by what he has wrought. Played on the newly dialed in IRSV, music puts a smile on your face and a tap in your toe. This new instrument is the best sounding affordable DAC we've yet to produce.
The innards of NuWave are based on the excellent Sabre series of Hyperstream 32 bit DAC chips, but that’s not unusual. If it were not for DirectStream, I would wager the majority of contenders for best performance at any price are also based on ESS technology. So what did Bob do to bring his magic to an affordable DSD platform? He added a type of FPGA to the front end. FPGAs, like those found on DirectStream, are the major workhorses of sophisticated technological equipment. Big FPGAs have millions of gates that programmers, like our Ted Smith, use to build the devices themselves – but that’s not what we did in the NuWave DSD. NuWave uses a smaller type of FPGA with a different acronym, CPLD, which stands for Complex Programmable Logic Device (these engineers love their TLAs). CPLDs are basically smaller FPGAs and can be taught to do whatever programmers desire. Though too small to handle all the functions of a DAC, as we do in DirectStream, they are large enough to pull a few rabbits from hats.