CES 2013

I hadn't seen Audionet before, but apparently they have been operating for several years in Germany and had a complete range of products in one of the larger rooms at T.H.E. Show. Of particular interest to me is their DNC DAC, which is available now and retails in the US for $8990. DNC stands for Digital Network Client and the product can access music from the standard 24/192 digital sources as well has NAS drives and iDevices.

So far so good, but what really caught my eye was watching the company's head engineer, Volker Wischniowski, pull up a laptop and start to manipulate frequency response curves which could then be uploaded to the DNC. You can hook a microphone to your PC, have the free software, called CARMA, calibrate for your microphone model and then use it to take readings in your playback environment. The software can then automatically make adjustments which you can also modify by hand. Upload these to the DNC and you are done.

Kal Rubinson has covered many room correction software suites that are either stand alone or are part of a preamp in the pages of Stereophile, but this is the first time I had seen this process available for a DAC.