Before Phison's PD2 hoofed it back to its Danish stable, I ran an informal A/B against the Rockna. To set the scene, some important boiler plate lifted verbatim from my Phison review. "Discussions on modern digital ought to include small print about its current spec craze being quite irrelevant. Digital specs continue to improve but they're surrounded by choking bottlenecks. The majority of popular recordings are artificial splice'n'dice jobs. They are also dynamically compressed butchery. Our speakers suffer distortions and nonlinearities several orders of magnitude higher than anything preceding them. Amplification components exhibit S/N ratios far below what's measurable in the digital domain. Our living rooms are sonically compromised. Unlike anechoic chambers, they also exhibit constant noise floors of 30-40dB. With 85dB peaks in the seat perceived as sufficiently loud by most, real-world dynamic range is seriously narrower than modern digital specs would have you believe. Drawing blood from this stone recently had one reader "realize the one thing you always emphasize: that there is no best. With the same budget, it is better to pursue several mid-level but excellent components than to spend every penny on a 'high-end' one." Having acquired an end-of-life Soulution DAC, he'd subsequently auditioned a far cheaper Aqua Hifi LaScala MkII. Confirming my assumption that he'd not been able to declare the first superior, he put it this way: "Exactly. I heard more difference than improvement." This didn't imply that the Soulution couldn't measure better. It could be technically more advanced. But until playback addresses a number of far greater weak links than the potential but currently minute benefits of escalating digital specs, getting geeky about -145dB SN/R and sundry misses the plot. It puts the cart before the horse. Far more fundamental flaws in the playback chain must be fixed first before digital advances can begin to matter to the extent they ought to given rising costs and propaganda. In other words, today's top digital tech already exceeds what's real-world relevant at this time. Due to analog gear, speakers, recordings and our rooms not having caught up, it can't fully deliver despite what its super specs would promise. Feel free to disagree. That's simply my opinion after having reviewed converters up to €20'000."

With PureMusic handling power-of-two upsampling of RedBook material to 352.8kHz, either DAC drove the Pass Labs XA30.8 amplifier via a 6-metre balanced Zu Event cable. Speakers were the 85dB Mythology M1 by EnigmAcoustics, their matching Sopranino super tweeters on top Mohawk style. Granted, a truer blood test for non-lossy digital volume would have been speakers of 100dB or higher efficiency. Those would enforce deeper attenuation to become critical rather sooner. I simply don't own any; nor did I have a pair on hand. I merely compared Phison to Rockna, the former with AKM's Verita AK4490 chip and analog volume, the later with discrete R2R and FPGA-embedded 63-bit digital volume. Where COS Engineering's D1 and the PD2 had been very much alike as chronicled in the latter's review—they'd played on the level, distinguished only by a slight offset in damping vs. bloom—the Rockna built out an actual lead. This manifested as a grouping of qualities which are perhaps best summarized as presence. The Rockna played it weightier, more robust/substantial, more focused and finally had more frontal in-room projection. Mind you, this still wasn't at anywhere near the hit-over-the-head force by which many imagine that expensive DACs justify their expense beyond the best of the ±€5K lot. As I had with the €20'000 Gryphon Kalliope vs. the €6'800 Fore Audio DAISy1, I simply heard enough extra to qualify it as superior performance, not just a different flavour.

On good recordings, the Rockna also unraveled more difference between similar instrumental timbres; and more strongly identified various unisono overlaid tone colours meant to create a new complex timbre. This ability to dig a bit deeper into an instrument's self sound, to make an oud still more 'oudy', less 'guitary' - that's what one expects from higher resolution and/or lower distortion. I'd thus accord the Wavedream some factual extra resolution which didn't just factor on paper. It actually mattered in a real-world context; if one cares and listens critically enough. Unlike with the TotalDAC d1-six-tube, I had no complaints about the lower reaches of Nucu's digital volume control. To quantify that with more specifics, I set up Lio as benchmark. Because the Vinnie Rossi lacks balanced outputs—that'd require four Slageformer attenuation modules for which there simply isn't enough room—I connected both Rockna amp direct and Rocka into Lio as volume control then amp via standard RCA cables.

At standard and lower levels, the autoformers had no advantage I could hear. It was only at very subdued levels that I thought that the Lio retained more substance and texture. Extending my session into an AB between XLR and RCA paths, the former won on the same count. Balanced sounded even more robust and incarnate; not matzah but primo meat balls. Identifying the true benefactor (the DAC; or whether the Pass amp simply sounds better via XLR than RCA) is beyond this review's purview. My basic takeaway was that while, versus the very best analog options, this digital volume control might lean out, eventually, I consider it a non issue in the real world of majority usage. The Wavedream's integration of this function really does decommission a separate preamp if one only runs digital sources. Obviously you must like your amp/speaker pairing as is. The Rockna won't inject 'tubular' qualities should you find those MIA. Just so, its class A output stage did exhibit all the telltale signs of active not passive preamplification. There was very obvious drive, gumption and physicality. Nothing about its sound was pale, wimpy or half baked.

Having in my book earned its €10K stripes with real if incremental returns over transistorized competitors from COS and Phison and—if recent memory was trustworthy—even the costlier d1-six-tube from France's discrete R2R champion Vincent Brient, I felt inclined to call it 'fair value'. That's despite the obvious perversity of associating anything hifi at €10'000 with the V word. Pushing the envelope to have a 100-metre sprinter beat an Olympic record by 1/100th of a second means real sacrifices and pain. As this page's first paragraph suggested, measurable digital gains might become more relevant once present choke holds in the hifi chain are lifted. That the Wavedream could already clock a lead plainly visible to the naked eye as it were, not merely by laser gun, impressed me given today's imbalanced circumstances. If you assemble proper digital competition, that happens rarely. With my triangulations squared off, what else should I say about the sound of Rockna's Wavedream?

Good crunch. As so often, it's a term borrowed from foodie talk. Even if two meals were to taste identical, the one with crunchier vegs or crispier crackling would win. That adds to the eating experience as distinctive textures and chewiness. The extreme opposite would be a gruel that goes down without any toothiness at all. No hifi should ever sound so homogenized. But even if it didn't, it still may not rise to that sensation of most excellent crunchiness. Suffice to say, the Wavedream had good crunch. Related to that or perhaps just another view on it was rhythmic virility. Anything percussive like actual drums, string plucks, brass and woodwind staccato was spiky, toned and unconfused. It's a quality often claimed as an R2R strength. Whether it automatically implies that ΔΣ can't equal it is for the engineers to debate. I'll just say that the Wavedream had taut timing precision in its back pocket. Finally, it also was chunky tonally. That means virtues one expects from valves relative to tone; or from Zu speakers based on their beefy 10.3" widebander used well into the lower treble. Combined with crunch, this chunkiness summed to feisty, robust and dynamically vigorous. This segues back at active not passive preamp action. A number of DACs no longer use actual output stages. Their output voltage past I/V conversion is high enough to not require an additional stage. The Wavedream has one and sounds it. Whether that's the actual cause matters not. What matters is describing the sound in ways which communicate. If you're familiar with the differences between active and passive preamps, this pointer ought to paint the picture.

Off the res. To communicate high resolution, hifi discussions routinely list tiny details their contributors hadn't heard before, on albums they were very familiar with. With the excellence of my resident competition, that really didn't seem to factor. What did were the aspects already mentioned. Is sonic materialism a function of more details? I consider it academic to break down what contributes to or causes more substance or robustness. It's enough to say that the gains the Wavedream exhibited over what I compared it to happened in that realm. Shall we be snarky and call it the analogue domain? That'd play to my belief that in the end, analog execution of output stage and power supply trump the digital half. If I kept an SE index like Aussie contributor John maintains his Darko index for digital converters, I'd list the Gryphon Kalliope at the very top. One tier below would have today's half-priced Rockna Wavedream and the Fore Audio DAISy1. Therein lies subtext. After all, both the Kalliope and DAISy1 drive Sabre, i.e. off-the-rack ICs, albeit with customized firmware. Going discrete R2R has more street cred but it's not the only way to make top sound. What Nicolae Jitaru's recipe ended up with was greater physicality or presence than the two solid-state DAC/pres I compared it to. What more could one want? Romania score a very memorable goal!

Rockna Audio website