About Us

About Us

What we are

Technically speaking, DAS (Digital Audio Systems) is a manufactory for designing, building and distributing high-quality digital audio devices. To this end we invest all our resources.

Practically speaking, we are purveyors of exclusive ‘transport machines’: we design and produce digital playback devices (music servers, streamers and amplifiers) that ‘transport’ the listener to a different place and time – according to choice. Whether the Jesus-Christus Church, Berlin in October 1972 for recording sessions of Puccini’s La Bohème with Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni under Herbert von Karajan or Carnegie Hall, New York in April 1959 for a live concert with Harry Belafonte, the sound experience – assuming a good recording – is always so breathtakingly realistic and spacious, that you feel like a party to the recording session or the live concert.

To produce such realism in digital music playback is no simple feat. And although digital playback is vastly superior to analogue playback in all measurable parameters, it is often high-end analogue equipement that produces the more live-like and engaging sound stages. As connoisseurs of high-end analogue equipment and passionate collectors of vinyl and reel-to-reel, it has been our ambition from the start, to realise in the digital domain the atmosphere and vivid realism of high-end analogue equipment and to combine that with the convenience of digital music management.

 

Where we come from

Like a number of other HiFi and High-End audio manufacturers, our enterprise was born out of our personal requirements for and expectations of high-end digital playback devices that the market did not meet – regardless of price. Hence, we found ourselves compelled to design and develop ourselves the devices with the properties and the quality that we wanted. That means, DAS players are no mass market products developed on the basis of the least common denominator derived from market analysis and consumer polling. They are custom developed products for a small group of demanding music connoisseurs and audiophiles – first of all ourselves. We believe that there are no comparable products on the market.

 

How we work

Following our high standards, we are a manufactory in which every device is built individually and by hand by experienced engineers and technicians, extensively tested and auditioned before it is dispatched to you. We document our quality testing with a test certificate that we attach to every delivery. We deliberately take the time to do our work thoroughly and conscientiously.

Parts and components that we do not produce ourselves, we buy from others. But we do so only from suppliers who have proven to us, that they share our quality standards and have implemented comparable rigid quality assurance procedures, so that they are able to guarantee consistent quality of deliveries.

What we stand for

I. The Soul of Music

DAS builds some of the best sounding digital playback equipment available (music servers, streamers and amplifiers). On the one hand, this is achieved by the no-compromise digital signal processing as well as the non-oversampling DAC technology employed, doing away with digital filters, to obtain a most natural sound free of digital harshness and artefacts. On the other hand, this is due to the sophisticated power supply management, separated for the various functional units and the massive mechanical construction, dividing the whole unit into a number of separate compartments in order to minimize mechanical and electrical interference. By these methods, we achieve a sound quality so natural and emotionally involving that the review magazine Stereoplay wrote in its review of our Model 2 (Sept. 2018 issue): “The end of a quest. If you have been missing the soul of the music in your digital playback systems, you need to audition DAS’ HD players.”

II. Analogue Life in the Digital Age

Apart from sound quality, the second most important aspect of digital music servers and streamers (HD-Players) is the way you interact with your music. As with our hardware, we place high demands upon the software with which our users control their HD-Players and listen to their music collections. Therefore, we did not follow the common approach of sourcing standard software and simply adapting it to our design. Instead, we have developed the software for our HD-Players from scratch according to our own specifications. On top of what standard software delivers, we paid particular attention to an intuitive and smooth user flow with high quality graphics, transferring some of the haptic and multimedia user experience from the vinyl era into the digital age. So, while you listen to your music, you can view high resolution front cover art, turn it over and view the back cover art as well as view the texts and pictures of the liner notes.

III. Exclusivity and Quality of Craftsmanship

Every HD-Player is individually hand crafted by experienced engineers and technicians and above all extensively tested. The mechanical construction with massive chassis plates and separate chambers for each functional unit minimizes vibration and electromagnetic interference and results in a casing where your valuable music files are as safely stored as in a vault. The combination of different materials with their meticulously crafted surfaces, like aluminium and precious woods gives each HD-Player its individual aura of simple technical elegance.