EAR 192 DACute review

Valve DACs are intrinsically anachronistic – Tim de Paravicini’s new EAR-Yoshino DACute takes the retro attitude a stage further by sounding deliberately analogue.

Hard to believe, I know, but the EAR-Yoshino 192 DACute Digital Audio Interface is the company’s first stand-alone D/A converter. The company has also produced CD players but, as main man Tim de Paravicini tells me, his previous experiences with digital mainly involved ‘bits of work for studios.’ But it was this studio connection that led Tim to develop the 192 DACute.

Given how word on the street pointed to the DACute as sounding ‘close to vinyl’ – this was said by more than one visitor to the EAR-Yoshino room at the Munich High-End Show – I simply had to ask Tim
just how he ‘voiced’ the DACute. ‘The most succinct way I can put it is this: because of my experience in mastering discs, those are the qualities of comfort that I was looking for from a digital source – without
cheating.’ He doesn’t come right out and say he was trying to emulate the easy silkiness of LPs, but it may seem that way.

Read the full review here.