Rockna DAC is available from £3950 for the single ended ‘edition’ model with balanced and ‘Signature’ versions also available. Released today is the latest firmware for existing customers and naturally new units will ship with Firmware 4.01 enabling DSD512 compatibility.

The company’s press release says “We always thought that high-end audio should be everything about innovation. Playing around with off-the-shelf available chips is fun and certainly a good and economic way to produce good sound. But once you want to design a cutting-edge product, the off-the-shelf approach doesn’t apply. Naturally, a custom solution, freed from the limitation of the available chipsets, come into place, allowing us to design and build from the scratch an entire digital audio system. All building blocks of the Wavedream DAC concerning digital processing are built entirely on a single piece of programmable silicon – a FPGA . With a FPGA, it’s internal hardware architecture could be described by a piece of software (actually, a very complex one). When upgrading the Wavedream with new firmware, you actually change it’s hardware. This system allows great flexibility, obsolescence protection and let us improve the sound of your dac by changing it’s internal architecture, or add new cool features, or improve the existing ones.”

Release notes for 4.01:

– enabled DSD256 (you need to set ASIO driver as output)

– enabled DSD512 (same)

– enabled dither option (not active in previous version)

– enabled clock option (same)

– brand new upsampling filters

For DSD256/512 playback files are scarce, one way of get great sound is to upsample everything is real-time using HQplayer (which can upsample to DSD512).

Dither “on” will reduce distortion for low level signals (starting at -80 dB and below) ; We used a triangular distribution, shaped mode dither – without increasing noise floor in the audio band.

Clock option works like this : stream mode will track the input frequency constantly while local mode will adjust the lock only from time to time, using a few stages of memory buffers.

Rockna Wavedream Dac and NET player is available in the UK at BD Audio.