One important note about listening to the Bartók: it needs about one hour to reach its fullest sonic potential after being turned on, even from the Standby setting on the Mosaic app. John Quick of dCS confirmed this in an e-mail and recommended from one to four hours to get the best results. I don’t have the luxury of waiting hours to get the best sound, so my solution to the problem was pretty simple: I left the Bartók on at all times and turned off the front panel display when I wasn’t listening. The Bartók never got much warmer than room temperature and that way it was always performing at its best. I strongly urge keeping it powered up, and making sure a dealer does the same before any audition. You won’t hear what this DAC is capable of without proper warm-up.

The latest changes to the Bartók include a firmware update and an updated Mosaic app to allow headphone users to select the new Expanse circuit, which adds two new settings to the Normal and Crossfeed choices. The differences between Crossfeed and either of the Expanse settings are not subtle and each has its place in headphone listening. The Crossfeed setting is based on Ben Bauer’s work in the 1960s at CBS and is designed to lessen the feeling of sound coming from inside your head. dCS states that the new Expanse settings expand on the original concept, but improve the ambient cues lost in Crossfeed circuits. As a result, reverberation trails and hall acoustic signatures should be enhanced by the new Expanse settings. The dCS website has an extensive white paper discussing Crossfeed and Expanse, and I recommend reading it for further insight into this new development. It’s interesting to learn how much added engineering went into developing the Expanse circuit. dCS’s research centers on channel separation, frequency-response modifications specifically for headphone use, and time delay between channels in order to make Expanse an improvement over a traditional Crossfeed circuit.

’m sure most audiophiles have a favorite album or a small group of reference tracks that they use to evaluate any new speakers, electronics or cabling. For me, the one CD that I use very early on into the review process is Rickie Lee Jones’ Pop, Pop CD [Geffen GEFD-24426]. I feel pretty confident that I have discovered every bit of recording minutiae on this album, from the child’s squeals and Jones’s soft voice behind Joe Henderson’s tenor sax on “Dat Dere,” to the microphone-preamp hiss that ramps up right before her voice enters in “Coming Back to Me.” I enjoy the selection of music, the quirky delivery of lyrics and the vocal presence of this well-known recording.

I wondered if the Bartók would reveal new, previously unheard details or emphasize some musical aspect I already knew well. The results were rather unexpected. I’ve been aware that Jones's vocals are less clear on certain songs, making her mumbling delivery even more distracting, or more charming, depending on your frame of reference. Looking at the liner notes to check some musicians’ names I realized that there are three different engineers credited on the recording, and with the Bartók I heard that each engineer delivers a different texture and purity to her voice. After all these years of listening, I had never realized this. The Bartók achieved this revelation not by hitting me over the head with resolution, resolution, resolution, as some DACs with aggressive treble might do. Instead, it simply delivered all the information on the recording, with a special nod to midrange clarity that was the key to my new appreciation of tunes I’ve listened to for years.

“I’ll Be Seeing You,” another track from the same album, begins with John Leftwich’s bowed bass, but Bob Sheppard takes over the bass line with his clarinet underneath the vocals of the first verse. The Bartók made this swap easier to catch, and if the clarinet tone isn’t quite as reedy as I’ve heard it, it was better delineated from the string bass sound preceding it. Again, the midrange clarity and resolution made this bit of music-arranging trickery easier to hear and appreciate.

I recently discovered Trio Chemirani’s Invite [Qobuz, 16-bit/44.1kHz stream] while sampling Jeff Joseph’s Graphene playlist. Playing the first cut, “Dar bâzé” with the Altec Valencia speakers pushed me back into my listening spot with superb transient speed and jump factor. I know that large horn speakers do those sorts of things well, but they were exceptional here. I was particularly impressed by the wall-to-wall soundstage, and I could point to images coming from way outside the speakers’ edges. It was almost like having some surround-sound mode engaged, and this effect was unexpected coming from horn speakers, with their tightly controlled treble dispersion. Throughout my auditioning, the Bartók’s soundstage width was most impressive, as was its precise image placement. Image depth initially seemed lessened because of the expansive soundstage width, but there was plenty of information lurking in the back corners of familiar recordings.

I discovered that in addition to a wide soundstage, definite strengths of the Bartók are transient attack and driving rhythmic energy, so I cued up Winds of War and Peace [Wilson Audio WCD-8823], with its (in)famous bass-drum explosions during “Liberty Fanfare.” The monstrous bass drum at the 1:00 mark was ultra clean and powerful. With the Bartók, I was hearing better separation of mallet strike, the drum head and bass-drum body resonance than I’d heard before, maybe even better than in the rooms using Wilson speakers at AXPONA. My modest system will never match the big Wilson speakers’ bass power, sheer volume or unflappable dynamics, but with the Bartók in the system, I was able to re-create a better impression of bass-drum tone. As an aside, I play trumpet in some local concert bands and I’ve performed “Liberty Fanfare” for several patriotic concerts. I’m always disappointed when our bass drum isn’t as awe-inspiring as the crushing whacks Lowell Graham and the National Symphonic Winds produced on this great Wilson Audio recording.

Speaking of bass, the Bartók was not only powerful, but it also had excellent control throughout the lower frequencies. I was searching both Tidal and Qobuz, rekindling my appreciation of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582. During that listening session, I happened to be listening to my Magnepan LRS speakers, and the Bartók gave those bass-shy speakers just the right tone and texture to fool my ears into thinking the 32Hz pedal notes were real, not imagined. This pairing of LRS and Bartók nailed that tonal combination of “growl and purr” that big pipe organs generate, and the result left me smiling and forgetting that I was missing a lot of the bottom end from those small panel speakers.

Finally, I was listening to a newly released recording on Qobuz of Mahler’s Symphony No.4 by the Bamberger Symphoniker, conducted by Jakob Hrusa with Anna Lucia Richter as soprano soloist [Qobuz, 24-bit/96kHz stream]. From an audiophile point of view, this is an excellent recording with wide dynamic range, good hall presence and fine orchestral timbre. It also possesses vastly superior string tone when compared with my favorite early digital release, Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony with Kiri Te Kanawa [London 410 188-2]. My complaint is that this new version misses the playfulness of the first movement and the “Child’s View of Heaven” that Mahler intended for the last movement, something that Solti and Te Kanawa capture so well.

What does this have to do with the dCS DAC? Well, I mention this because I was frequently distracted from the reviewer’s job of “sonic hide-and-seek,” dissecting recordings for treble response, bass power, midrange liquidity, etc. The Bartók forced me to listen to music first, then consider sound, fulfilling dCS’s motto, “Only the music.”

Some reviewers have written about paring down their systems to using just an amp with a DAC like the Bartók as digital source and preamp. The sheer simplicity of this idea is enticing to me, and I think I could make it work with the right amp. I experimented with my Innersound ESL amp with balanced cabling from the Bartók and the sound was pretty good. The problem is this: the Innersound amp is about as neutral as can be, and paired with the similarly neutral Bartók, the sound was good but lacked the warmth I’ve grown accustomed to. I got used to this combination, but it may have been more of an admiration of the ease of use rather than love for the results. To be fair to the Bartók, inserting my Yamamoto CA-04 preamp does bring some tube warmth in the upper mids, but it also fattens up the sound in the midbass and thickens the vocal range. While I may enjoy the Yamamoto sound a bit more when it is used between the Bartók and Innersound amp, the Bartók was certainly the more evenhanded of the two preamps. Also, the Yamamoto can be a bit polite, dynamically speaking, so the Bartók’s fast transients and lively bass response were a good shot in the arm for the overall sound.

If the Bartók/Innersound combo was a bit too dry, my BAT VK-60 amp was a perfect companion, as the BAT amp consistently added just the right amount of warmth. Its big, glowing 6C33C output tubes not only warmed the listening room like a space heater during the winter, but they also worked some midrange magic, delivering many great listening sessions. Bartók owners thinking of going for a minimalist, digital-only approach should certainly investigate a good tube amp with appropriate loudspeakers. It turns out to be a winning partnership and one that I could easily choose to live with.

Finally, for the sake of completeness, I tested the Bartók's headphone output. I initially used my Sony MDR-F1 headphones, with their lower-than-normal 12-ohm impedance. Although dCS recommends using headphones with impedance above 30 ohms, the Bartók had no trouble driving the Sonys to sufficient volume levels with no sense of strain or distortion. Next, I tried my ancient pair of Koss 4AAs because of their fairly high 250-ohm impedance. Again, no trouble, and I’m positive this is the best those old cans have ever sounded. For serious listening, I settled on a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-W1000s for unbalanced and HiFiMAN HE560s for balanced playback. Because dCS has recently added the Expanse settings to the headphone menu, I spent most of my headphone listening toggling among Crossfeed, Expanse 1 and Expanse 2. To be honest, the straight feed from the headphones sounds too ordinary after enjoying the Crossfeed or Expanse settings, and I never wanted to return to an unenhanced headphone signal.

I particularly enjoyed Expanse 1 and 2 for synthetic, ambient music like Joseph Beg’s Long Term Memory [Tidal, 16-bit/44.1kHz stream, from the dCS Expanse playlist] or Brian and Roger Eno’s Mixing Colours [Qobuz, 24-bit/44.1kHz stream]. The sonic landscapes of these selections washed over me using the Expanse 1 setting with images floating across my inner soundstage. Your experience may be different, but with either the Crossfeed or Expanse settings, I didn’t get the impression that the images moved in front of my face, as if listening to loudspeakers. Instead, images moved slightly upward and toward the center of my head. Returning to the normal headphone setting collapsed the soundstage and the experience was rather bland and uninteresting by comparison. Another interesting recording to hear with the Expanse settings was Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (from Surrealistic Pillow [Qobuz, 24-bit/44.1kHz stream]). With the Crossfeed setting, the bass and snare were pretty solidly rendered hard left and right, and the reverb slap in the right channel was more pronounced than with the normal headphone signal. Changing to Expanse 1 brought the snare more toward the center, with significantly improved definition and the snare gained body, as if it was now performed on a wooden-shelled drum as opposed to a metal-shelled snare.

I generally chose Crossfeed for orchestral and minimally mic’d recordings and Expanse 1 for studio recordings, particularly those that manipulated the soundstage. I did find one particularly enjoyable use for Expanse 2 while doing a deep dive into remastered versions of the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead. With the first  [Qobuz, 16-bit/44.1kHz stream], the original introduction to “Uncle John’s Band” has a swirling reverb overlaying the guitar chords and bass guitar. With Expanse 2 engaged, this trippy, spacey effect sounded like it was played back by a Leslie speaker with its motor-driven horn engaged. Later remastering in 2013 [Warners/Rhino, 16-bit/44.1kHz download] removed the reverb for a cleaner opening, but I missed the psychedelic original, particularly as rendered by the Expanse 2 setting.

wondered if a dedicated NOS (non-oversampling) audiophile could find enjoyment in an EOS (everything oversampling/upsampling) world. With the dCS Bartók, the answer is an emphatic yes. For two months, the Bartók worked flawlessly, delivering hours of superb listening. Its sleek, modernist design houses cutting-edge digital technology to produce an elegant, opulent sound. It was a pleasure to hear, and a pleasurable return to my oversampling/upsampling roots.