dCS Elgar plus vs. Delius - confused

Hi Gtfour45,

Thanks a lot for your very helpfull answer.
I am not sure yet is Elgar plus capable of accepting 24bit/192 kHz data?
For instance,if someone uses a Purcell in front of Elgar and feeds it 24/192,is Elgar plus able to process it?
As i understood,with Purcell,you can feed it with any (RCA,BNC or Toslink) 16bit/44.1kHz data,and get out of it anything you want?24/96,24/194 or even DSD at Firewire output?

Yes, Elgar Plus accepts 24/196 with their dual AESBU. And I also second Gtfour45 opinion in that replacing the stock firewire cable is a worthwhile upgrade. In my case using all Siltech cablings. Prior to fw cable change have always preferred their dual AESBU, whereas now, mostly listens to the DSD up-sampled format.

Do consider including their Verona master clock in the stack if budget permits. Another 'very worthwhile' difference! Making the whole musical presentation more analogue and relax sounding, with you feeling just more 'there' there.

Also pay particular attention to cabling - ICs, power cords and good AC too. Otherwise they might leave one the impression of being a tad cold / clinical as often wrongly perceived by some. Having lived with them happily for 5yrs now, I can confidently say that they are anything but "that". When optimally set up, imo it still is one of the better digital playback system worthy of respect today.

And I believe, with their newer releases, classic DCS stack could be snap up quite reasonably in the second hand market now (thus very good value). Hope all this help. Best!

To the best of my knowledge DCS DACs do not use a volume control in the digital domain, rather they use a switched analogue attenuation network. I have found the DAC attenuator to be less intrusive than any preamp that I have inserted afterward,

Murray

Hi audiobb,

You are right - if you have a Purcell and a 1394-equipped Delius or Elgar Plus, you can feed in native CD sample rate and choose which upsampled rate you want to listen to, all the way up to the DSD rate. So if you want to make the effort, you can decide "I like CD A best upsampled at 96kHZ, but prefer CD B at 192 and CD C, D, E and F at DSD".

The Purcell can also take a range of different rates as input (see the website for the exact values).

There's a good review in the on-line Stereophile archives (about 2003 I think) that goes through the possibilities.

You haven't said what you are considering as transport, so I should mention that dCS Verdi is a transport only and requires a Purcell for upsampling, whereas Verdi LaScala and its replacement Verdi Encore have DSD upsampling built-in.

That means you don't need a Purcell, but then your choices are limited to CD upsampled to DSD through the Firewire or CD at its native rate through another digital input.

You can still use a Purcell with the LaScala and Encore, to get the wider range of upsampling choices.

It gets a bit complicated...