The Cascade DAC

The Cascade DAC was born of an unwavering dedication to perfecting our craft, enabled by our enthusiasm for in-house design and vertically integrated manufacturing. This starts a new era—one built on twin foundations of innovation and experience. We began by reimagining the fundamentals of known DAC architectures from the ground up. Critical to the success of the Cascade DAC has been dividing the conversion process into three dedicated chassis and functions. First, all of the processing, sources, and interfaces that are necessary, but electrically noisy, have been concentrated in the Cascade Digital Director. Next, all of the critical low noise analog electronics have been housed in the Cascade Analog Converter. Finally, all of the analog power supplies have been moved to the dedicated Cascade Powerbase. This ideal component division enables sublime analog playback in nearly any system and listening environment. Let’s dive deeper into these building blocks to explore the industry leading technologies involved.

Recovering the recording

In order to push our audio technology even further, the Digital Director uses two high performance DSPs, each capable of sustaining 12 billion operations per second that work in tandem with two dedicated FPGAs. This is more than 4x the power of our previous generation of DACs. But that’s not all: advanced new digital filters, born from decades of research and development and tailored specifically for the Cascade DACs hardware, ensure that the Cascade DAC offers a superior, authentic reconstruction of the original analog signal. What emerges is the most natural and emotional presentation we’ve ever created.

Bit Diffusion Technology

MSB’s latest innovation: Bit Diffusion Technology. It is a significant, technological step forward in musicality, resulting in wonderfully natural playback. Dustin’s concept for BDT was initially sparked by considering the relationship between an atom and an electron’s probability density function. Mimicking this natural phenomena, Bit Diffusion is applied to the Cascade’s unique architecture of 16 independent DAC channels. Low-level ambient noise and digital artifacts are diffused, adding to analog-like sound and a much more relaxed, fatigue-free presentation. The soundstage has become more holographic than ever with improved dynamics and separation.

The Cascade-Link

With modern digital technologies, such as servers, WiFi networks and LED lighting, it’s nearly impossible to create analog signals that are not only accurate, but also unpolluted and low noise. MSB developed many unique technologies in-house to make precision analog performances possible in any music playback setting. One of those vital and unique technologies is the Cascade-Link. Based on modern diode laser fiber optics, the Cascade-Link is a noise free, high bandwidth data river specifically designed to feed the insatiable hunger of the Hybrid DAC MKII’s in the Analog Converter without conducting any upstream electrical noise.

Part 1: The Digital Director

The Digital Director is the brain of the Cascade system, handling all the digital processes. It acts as an intermediary between digital players, transports, renderers, servers, computers, and the analog domain. It is able to identify, configure and process nearly any digital format with advanced new algorithms for faithful reproduction. It features a low noise linear power supply, elegant user controls, and a high visibility discrete LED display, along with user installable digital input modules. It then outputs a conversion ready signal over the fully isolated optical Cascade-Link to the Cascade Analog Converter. This allows you to easily place the Digital Director anywhere in your system with the reassurance that the analog processes are free of digital interference.

Part 2: The Analog Converter

If the Digital Director is the brain behind the Cascade System, the Analog Converter is the beating heart. With 8 New Hybrid DAC MKII modules, a Femto 33 MKIII Clock, passive analog stages, and 75 ohm volume controls, the Analog Converter makes the music come alive. Freed from the burden of any brute force digital processing, the Analog Converter is supremely adapted for the task of meticulous analog conversion. Digital music flows over the noise free Cascade-Link directly to the hybrid DACs, while stunning analog performances are received by the integrated analog inputs. The Hybrid DAC MKII

A new generation of Hybrid DACs allow the Digital Director to extract the maximum resolution from all of your music files and from all data formats. As a fully balanced, ultra-high precision, discrete ladder DAC architecture, it reproduces all of the musicality, soundstage, and texture of the original performance. With 4X the DATA bandwidth of our previous generation.

Femto Clock MKIII

Our industry-leading Femto 33’s new Mark III configuration has been optimized for maximum performance with the Cascade DAC. Featuring two hand-tuned, ultra-low phase noise, oven controlled crystals that yield the lowest jitter for both the 44.1kHz and 48kHz digital format families.

Unrivaled analog performance

The moment an analog signal is created, it becomes vulnerable to irreversible degradation. To combat this, we have designed our analog stages to minimally affect the fragile analog signals they create. Balanced signals from the Hybrid DAC modules are passed directly to a completely passive, 75 ohm, constant impedance analog stage. They are passively attenuated and then immediately exit the XLRs without ever touching an amplifier of any kind. This preserves signal purity to the utmost degree while still enabling any cable, amplifier, or preamp to be optimally driven. Selection of each volume step is done by precious metal contact, latching relays whose coils are switched to ground when not active to avoid any signal corruption. Volume attenuation is done with distributed components so that no one precision part has too much power dissipation, thereby preserving the maximum linearity of the signal. The signal path is fully balanced and differential to prevent any ground currents from polluting the delicate signals.

Part 3: The Powerbase

The analog performance is only as good as the power supplies that support it, that’s why we have completely overhauled our powerbase technologies for the Cascade system. The Cascade includes smart power controls, like our 12V trigger system, for a unified power experience.

A clean source

The Cascade Powerbase builds on our extensive experience with power supplies for critical analog circuitry. AC power is often polluted with interference from local computers, lighting, and appliances. This is why we have added an additional layer of protection with internal AC filtering that acts to significantly reduce this interference. To increase performance, we have three higher VA custom wound transformers that are electrically and magnetically shielded. After being converted to DC by discrete silicon carbide rectifiers, the raw power is then filtered by new optimized banks of inductors and capacitors to remove the majority of the residual noise from the raw DC. This is then regulated by our discrete, ultra-low noise linear power supplies. The five individual power rails are output for use by the Cascade Analog Converter.