The new, compact, SIACD expands on, and is styled to match ATC’s range of stand-alone electronic products for home installation. The SIACD is built to the same design and manufacturing standards as the company’s internationally renowned professional audio products.
Overview
This new product is designed as a simple yet versatile one-box solution for D-A conversion, CD playback, pre and power amplification duties. The SIACD is housed in a rugged yet elegant chassis, only 315mm/12.4” wide. Styling compliments the rest of ATC’s range of outboard pre and power amplifiers and the product is available in both black and silver brushed and anodised finishes.
Whereas many other manufacturers’ favour class-D power amp technology for compact devices, ATC have based the power amp design on the class A/B circuits employed in their highest performance professional, active loudspeakers, thus ensuring the highest possible performance of this vital element of an all-in-one player amplifier. In this revised design, ATC engineers have made further improvements to their discrete MOSFET output stage to give vanishingly low levels of distortion, very wide bandwidth and a reduced idle temperature. Maximum output power is 100W per channel, continuous, into 8 ohms with both channels driven. The resolution offered by this approach is simply above and beyond what is available from most ‘high-end’ stand-alone power amplifiers, let alone ‘all-in-one’ player/amplifiers.
The preamp/DAC stage features two, line level, stereo, analogue inputs and three digital inputs. Both analogue inputs are equipped with rear panel mounted, RCA/phono connections. One of the two inputs also features a front panel mounted 3.5mm jack input for simple connection to portable music players. The USB, SPDIF and optical inputs are mounted on the rear panel. The DAC utilises Wolfson’s WM8740 chipset and is compatible with 16 to 24 bit word lengths and sample rates up to 192kHz (coaxial and optical digital inputs only). Excellent digital clock recovery ensures signal integrity is maintained even with poorer quality digital sources and the SIACD. The USB input is compatible with word lengths up to 16 bits and sample frequencies up to 48kHz and is galvanically isolated from the digital source via a high performance transformer. The SIACD headphone amplifier is specified to drive a very wide range of headphone sensitivities and impedances. It features very low distortion and noise and an extremely wide and flat frequency response for best possible performance. The headphone output is front panel mounted.
The chassis is constructed from a combination of steel and aluminium and uses constrained layer damping to control panel resonances. The front panel is machined from an extruded section of 13mm/0.5” aluminium alloy with a brushed and anodised silver or black finish. All the user controls are machined from solid aluminium.
For more details and photos, click here – SIACD
