UNVEILING THE £200K dCS VARÈSE

Janine Elliot travels to Bedforshire to check out the new dCS Varèse, a five-box digital audio system that aims to set a new standard for music reproduction.

The 29^th November 2024 was just a typical cold wintery day, 2 days before the “official” first day of Winter in the UK as I drove through the rolling hills of the Bedfordshire countryside into a farm hidden from the roadside, careful to miss the pheasants and squirrels that welcomed me into the home of The Hi-fi Lounge and an event presented by Absolute Sounds. I was there to see the new dCS (Data Conversion Systems) Varèse before it goes on sale in January 2025.

DCS VARÈSE

Having been rightly proud of their excellent 4-box Vivaldi introduced 12 years ago, or even their Bartok or Rossini digital marvels, the team at dCS never sit still, so they have been working for over 5 years now to produce from the ground up something even better, bigger (5 boxes!), beautiful and bolder.

dCS, based in Cambridge (like so much of British design excellence), has been working on zeros and ones since 1987. Set up by Oxford University graduate Mike Story the company started by offering advice to aviation and aerospace industries and soon gaining a reputation in signal conversion expertise. Working early on with the MOD they were commissioned to design the Blue Vixen radar system for the Royal Navy’s Harrier FA 2 jump jets during the Cold War (using digital signal processing technology) as well as build machines to keep the BBC “pips” on time every hour, to A2D, D2D and D2A technologies to extend the conceived excellency of digitally produced audio through our speakers into our analogue heads. With a motto of “Only the Music”, this is not an easy task, but with all the design and build carried out in the University town their great team, headed now by president David Steven (16 years at dCS) and chief technician Andy McHarg (31 years!) they have clearly produced something here that brings music totally alive into the room, especially with the Wilson Audio Chronosonic speakers and Dan D’Agostino Momentum and Progression amplification on demonstration. I would need to remortgage my house for this lot! Mike Story was an audiophile with friends in the recording industry, so he worked hard to create digital converters to the professional recording and broadcasting studio. 1993 saw the first world’s 24bit D2A converter, the dCS 950, and then with help from Cambridge-based Allen Boothroyd (of Lecson then Meridian Fame, as well as the BBC Micro!) came the Elgar in 1996 converting 24bit/96kHz into the home of many audiophiles. With names of famous music composers, the new “Varèse” is the most avant-garde and modern name, which suitably describes this new product!

This is a 5-box network server, combining the “hub” or Core streaming and processing unit, a pair of Mono DACs, an optional Master Clock and a separate high-spec User Interface unit with full-length screen showing album cover and detail of the music, etc. At over £200,000 for the complete works, this is for those who really value what they can hear, and will be manufactured in fairly low numbers, obviously. A CD/SACD drive is also appearing soon. Apart from the User Interface, the units are typical dCS shape fronted boxes, each with its own individually sculptured curves and with just a central LED to show they are switched on. One of the greatest challenges in design over the previous “one-box” Vivaldi DAC is ensuring the two Mono DACs in the Varèse sync precisely, with no latency especially at today’s greater bandwidth; the rising edge clock time needs to be the same time for both left and right channels to make it sound correct! With Tomix, their new clock technology, and also their ACTUS, which controls all the signal, timing and control signals between the boxes, this all needs to work “as one”. Cables to connect to the “hub” are made in-house by dCS with the connectors by Lemo. The back of the boxes is well laid out and it is very easy to connect up all the cables. The rear of the Core hub has 3 expansion slots for upgrades, as they will no-doubt happen over the next few months and years in this developing technology. The User Interface has an enormous screen for easy read at distance, though all controlling and selection can also be made from the dCS app on your tablet/iPAD. Other new technologies in the Varèse include a new Differential Ring DAC, which is a big change to previous generations of their Ring DAC architecture, taking digital audio to the next level, by leaps and bounds, and there are numerous power supply and circuitry innovations, including their flexible PCB technology. This is all created in-house by the dCS team with metalwork built nearby and only the empty boards made outside the UK (as most companies do these days as it is cheaper).

SO, HOW DOES IT ALL SOUND?

After coffee and cakes to whet our appetite for good music, and an introduction from dCS the musical listening began. What I find so often in reviewing and listening to manufacturers and distributors of good audio is the choice of music from the 50’s and 60’s which was so well recorded. This listening session included the excellent Nat King Cole “The Very Thought of You”, with great warmth from the strings, typical of music coming from the Capitol label from that period. This was astounding! Similarly, the voice was clear and realistic. Vocals were particularly good from a female version of “The Sound of Silence” (Simon and Garfunkel) and other famous songs being played. Everything sounded really natural and accurate with no hint of digital artefacts, except her digital piano! Turning to funk/jazz from American Webster Lewis and “Do You Believe?” live at Club 7 in Norway, this was really foot-tapping music with tight and fast hi-hat, clear snare, vocals and instrumentation, with forceful chords on the Hammond organ. It was hard not to imagine the musicians in the room with me, with me lucky to reserve my seat in the very best position. Even Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water” sounded very real, if a little bit too loud for my own personal preference, but the bass and percussion were quick, powerful and very natural and I was back in the halls of residence at my university! This was not like I had heard from other D2As. It was only the song “Stabat Mater” from Schubert that sounded a little compressed, but this was the recording and not the equipment here. All in all, the performances I heard on the farm were detailed and emotional with an expansive soundstage that led me closely into the world of the music being performed. I was there with the musicians, living their feelings and aggression as well as their human benevolence. The boundary between digital and analogue has definitely been redefined here, and as an owner of 19 reel to reel tape recorders felt a little bit more humbled!

Edgard Varèse might not be a well-known French composer to many, but what he did was help redefine music for the 20^th century, spending most of his time in America and emphasizing timbre and rhythm in his music, something the dCS Varèse does emphatically. Varèse looked closely at creating unique music especially in intonation and in his use of musique-concrete sounds. This introduction to the dCS couldn’t therefore end without his “Ionisation” for percussion, piano, and two sirens at the showcase! Varèse was particularly an innovator of “sound production” creating music from electronics, particularly in the 1950s, startling much of his audience (much as this dCS did here in a good way!). As someone working in electronics, he needed to know how he wanted it all to sound for it to make sense and be real, just as any good electronic D2A designer would want to do. His music might well have been dissonant and rhythmically asymmetric and hard to understand, but he made a big statement, something dCS’s namesake does magnificently. The dCS Varèse makes a very, very big statement, and the music is as real I have heard from any digital or analogue music. But, you will need a big wallet, and probably a big new rack to put it all on!

Janine Elliot

Designed, engineered and built in limited quantities in Cambridge, England, the dCS Varèse system begins shipping towards the end of this year. A CD/SACD transport will be added in 2025.

UK RRPs as follows:

• Varèse Core, User Interface and Remote Control: £95,000
• Varèse Mono DAC: £90,000 (pair)
• Varèse Master Clock: £32,500