Swiss brand Weiss has released their new The DSP501 and DSP502 units. They have the same features as Weiss’ D/A Converter counterpart, the DAC501 and 502, but the DSP units have a digital output instead of an analogue one. This allows users to connect a separate D/A Converter to the DSP501 or 502 or to use it to feed active speakers with digital inputs.

Weiss told us: “More and more highend speaker models are active, i.e. have built-in amplifiers and some of them even sport digital inputs in order to keep the number of A/D and D/A conversions in the signal chain at a minimum. For such a speaker the DSP501 or 502 is the ideal front-end. It is Roon Ready and thus supports playback directly from a NAS or via Internet streaming (Tidal, Qobuz, radio) or from a computer etc. USB and S/PDIF and AES/EBU inputs are there as well. The DSP501 or 502 plus an active speaker makes for a minimalistic system with a great sound and all the features needed”.

DSP501/502 Web Interface

The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) features include a room equalizer to get rid of room modes, a creative equalizer (tone control), a Vinyl emulator, an algorithm to keep the playback volume at a constant level for night time listening, a crosstalk canceling program for a new live-like listening experience. More algorithms are in development, including some exclusively for headphone based playback.

Headphones

The DSP501 and 502 sports two outputs with two separate DSP signal chains. This allows you to select output #1 for speaker based playback and switch over to output #2 for headphone based playback. Both outputs use different DSP algorithms.

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