This is a product that is built solid, even set in amongst an audio industry that tends to over-engineer its products. It effectively nails build quality from first principles, by following the design brief set in the Brinkmann catalogue. These people are known professionally as ‘idiots’.īrinkmann set out its store for the Nyquist in its white paper, describing three main goals the product had to achieve: quality, longevity, and ease of use (quality in this case means both sound and build quality).
#High end digital to analog audio converter full
Of course, the audio world is full of ‘glass half empty’ types who will undoubtedly see this as lazy product design. That gives the Brinkmann equipment a commonality of design to which few other brands could ever aspire, and it allows the company to focus on the audio circuit instead of fancy casing. Headphone socket and rear panel aside, you actually have to look at the circuit to see which model you are using. All three come supplied with a large granite base. They all have a central blue two-deck LED screen flanked by a pair of dials and four push-buttons (three and a headphone socket in the Nyquist), with a quartet of valves built into the side heatsinks, a smoked glass top plate showing the minimalist red PCB, and an identically sized external power supply. None of which smacks of a company in line to make the one of the best, most high-tech MQA-ready digital converters around.įrom an industrial design perspective, the Nyquist doesn’t just share some common aspects with the rest of the range, the product looks functionally identical to the Marconi preamp and the Edison phono stage from the brand.
All of which are superbly built, many of which sound wonderful, and a number of which feature valves. Since then, Brinkmann has been the go-to brand for top-notch turntables, tonearms, cartridges, preamplifiers, power amplifiers, integrated amplifiers, phono stages, and power supplies. In fact, it’s not really known as a maker of digital audio at all, although the company did produce a high-end DAC called the Zenith 30 years ago.
Damn it! Now for the more meaty bits.īrinkmann is not known for producing the cutting edge of digital audio performance. The only thing wrong with it is it has to go back to the distributor. Before you even register what happened, a whole evening of listening just swept by, and you are eager to repeat the experience over and over again. You plug the Nyquist in, listen to some music, and time dissolves.
The Brinkmann Nyquist DAC is the most inviting-sounding DAC I have heard, or at least the most inviting-sounding converter this side of the Nagra HD DAC. Many reviews are harder to write than this one.
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