Why the history lesson? Because the story has come full circle and it’s the background context against which the current 10 Series digital products must be understood. Until recently, few products had a shorter shelf-life or more rapid depreciation than high-end digital components. How many five-year-old DACs are worth even a third of their purchase price, let alone ones that have been around for a decade and a half? Yet the CH Precision C1/C1.2 is still current, still updatable and still highly competitive. Not only is the company’s approach unique, it’s more than a simple promise. Many manufacturers claim their products are ‘future proof’: CH has actually delivered on that promise – and done so consistently and without product redundancy or cost penalty to its customers.
It’s something to consider when a company expects you to pay upwards of €80,000 for a digital component…
The arrival of the D1/C1 coincided with the shift in digital development from hardware and successive DAC chips to software and DSP processing. The C1 was a resolutely DSP driven DAC, with Thierry Heeb (he would be the H in CH) a leading exponent of the approach, ultimately developing the sophisticated spline filters that CH’s digital components rely on to this day, pairing them with venerable PCM 1704 R2R DAC chips. So, if the digital hardware has been around since the C1, the software is based on the same essential thinking and principles and the chassis themselves appear almost unchanged, what justifies the substantial price hikes that CH are asking for the D10 and C10? It’s finally time to take a far closer look at what goes into the 10 Series digital components – and what comes out…
The D10 CD/SACD transport
Like all 10 Series components, the new D10 disc transport is a twin-chassis design, with a substantial, separate power supply. In terms of physical dimensions, it equates to the existing D1.5, paired with its optional X1 external supply. However, that’s where the similarities end. For starters, the D10 is a top-loading unit, using a modified and re-engineered version of the company’s own MORSe mechanism. In the drawer-loading D1.5, the motor is mounted to a substantial, solid brass sled, for stability and to dissipate mechanical energy. But the fact that the motor spindle needs to be elevated to lift the disc clear of the tray, means there’s a limit on how heavy it can be. In the D10, the fixed, top-loading transport suffers no such constraints. The brass motor mounting block weighs ten-times as much as the one in the D1.5! That drops the system resonance from the 50Hz achieved in the D1.5 to a mere 17Hz in the D10. Combined with the massive brass base-plate that acts as a mechanical ground plane for the four, titanium-tipped grounding/levelling spikes, it also helps account for the unit’s astonishing 42kg weight: astonishing when you pick it up that is. It’s genuinely surprising that anything so comparatively compact can be so dense. Constraints imposed by the sheer size of the mechanism mean that the magnetically attached caps that cover the grounding spikes are actually smaller than the standard ones on other CH units. As you won’t be employing the stacking function for obvious reasons, the implications are purely aesthetic.
