dCS has unveiled its most advanced music system to date, promising a level of performance that it says goes beyond anything it has ever created.
The Varèse sits at the top of the brand’s existing product platforms and is the result of a series of projects that began a few years ago, says the British brand.
While exploring how to improve the sonic and measured performance of its DACs, its engineers also considered whether they could develop a unified system to transport audio, timing and control signals, while improving clocking arrangements between audio components.
However, it also wanted to make it even easier for listeners to discover music and manage playback, and carried out a range of interviews with dCS owners worldwide to understand what the future of music interfaces might look like.
Bringing these two strands of research together, dCS decided to create a complete playback system that it says “reimagines how we interact and listen to music” and “reinterprets the dCS experience for a new era”.
Big upgrades come at a cost
The Varèse music system comprises five components, including the Core streaming and processing unit (£75,000), two mono DACs (one for each audio channel, £90,000 for the pair), a separate user interface unit (£20,000) and the optional master clock (£32,500), for a total eyewatering price of £217,500. A dedicated CD/SACD transport will be added to the lineup in 2025.
A suite of new technologies developed in-house at the Cambridge-based hi-fi manufacturer is at the heart of making this ambitious music system possible, including the biggest upgrade to dCS’s respected Ring DAC architecture in a decade.
This joins a new patented clocking technology called dCS Tomix, and a bespoke interface for carrying audio, control and timing signals between components called Actus, all helping to reduce jitter while increasing linearity, lowering the noise floor and eliminating crosstalk.
The result for the listener is, dCS says, an improved sense of realism across the board, with a more expansive soundstage and an increased sense of musicality and rhythmic flow, all helping to create a closer emotional connection with the music at hand.
The dCS Varèse will be unveiled for the first time at the Hong Kong AV Show on 9th August, before it travels to other events worldwide. Demos will be available in the UK and US from September, with shipping beginning later in the year.
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