The dCS Scarlatti Upsampler

Well first and foremost the dCS Scarlatti System is the best CD player we have ever heard bar none.

Combined with the dCS Scarlatti DAC, dCS Scarlatti CD/SACD Transport and Scarlatti Master Clock the performance beggars belief. It takes CD as a format further than we thought possible.

Combined with appropriate amplification, speakers, support and cabling the Scarlatti raises the bar sky high.

This is pretty much on permanent demonstration in-store and we love it. If you are one of the lucky few who are in a position to purchase such an stunning product why not arrange a demonstration.....you will not be disappointed.

More will follow in due course when our dCS Rough Guide appears.

A little bit from dCS

Our design philosophy in building Scarlatti was to use our 21 years of experience to deliver the best digital playback components in the business without compromise. For people who are serious about their music, the natural realism delivered by Scarlatti is like no other system on the planet.

The patent pending (GB0817141.5) Scarlatti Upsampler or digital-to-digital converter (DDC) converts digital audio data at one sample rate to a higher sample rate, providing listeners with higher levels of performance from any industry standard digital source, including PC and Media Servers.

Upsampling to progressively higher sample rates makes progressive improvements to fine detail, sound stage depth and image separation. This means the sound quality increases as you upsample CD data first to 24/88.2, then to 24/176.4, then to DSD.

Using Scarlatti Upsampler to present data with a higher information capacity to the dCS Ring DAC results in extraordinary performance as our patented dCS Ring DAC, which is a discrete balanced design, does not use any off-the-shelf DAC chips commonly found in other manufacturers' product.

All of the Scarlatti products benefit from our ‘soft' approach to programmable logic, which allows new software to be loaded from a dCS update disc to add new features and adapt to changes in digital formats.

The Scarlatti Upsampler's USB interface operates in "asynchronous" mode (NOT to be confused with asynchronous rate conversion), where the Upsampler synchronises the audio by providing a feedback pipe to the PC. The PC then is effectively locked to the Upsampler, which can have a much more accurate clock and much lower jitter.

Using the Scarlatti Upsampler via USB
USB is isochronous. This means that the host (PC) and client (Scarlatti Upsampler) both know how much bandwidth is available at the outset, so the host can guarantee that bandwidth will be available all the time.

Your music may be stored on a large Hard Disc Drive (HDD) in a different room, linked by WiFi to a small, silent device (such as a laptop) connected by USB cable to the Scarlatti Upsampler. When the user selects the audio for playback, the Mac/PC streams all of the selected data from the HDD or Network Assigned Storage (NAS) device, then outputs the data on USB.

The audio flowing between the PC and Upsampler is packetised PCM at 32, 44.1, 48, 88.2 or 96kS/s. It is the job of the codecs installed on the PC to decode the data and present it to the Upsampler in a standard PCM format.