World’s Most Advanced Digital Audio System Unveiled In UK

Cambridge-based dCS is a family-owned British company, founded in 1987 by Oxford University graduate Mike Story and a team of electronics engineers. The company started by developing signal conversion systems for radar installations before moving on to launch the world’s first hi-res 24-bit audio DACs for pro and consumer use in the 1990s. Today, dCS concentrates on developing the latest high-end digital audio technology.

Having always been innovators of digital audio—specifically the digital-to-analog conversion systems crucial to digital sound—dCS is considered by many to be the very best in its field. Everything the company makes is developed from the ground up and built using proprietary dCS technologies. There’s nothing “off the shelf” about any of its products because dCS is 100% driven by its R&D.

Although many of dCS’s products are high-end, even the company’s more affordable product line—the Lina Network DAC, Master Clock and Headphone Amplifier—is packed with dCS innovations, including an ingenious way to fold a main circuit board 90 degrees around the unit’s sides to enable all the sophisticated circuitry to squeeze inside a compact chassis without making any compromises.

The still-current Vivaldi series was the company’s flagship digital audio line, with the Vivaldi APEX DAC considered to be one of the world’s finest… until now. The new five-box Varèse streaming DAC is the result of the company’s engineers being allowed to throw off their shackles to develop an ultimate design that redefines digital audio.

Unfortunately, the latest innovation doesn’t come cheap. The complete five-box Varèse system will set you back a cool £217,500 / $305,000 without amplification or speakers which cost extra. What the customers of dCS are paying for is the R&D and extreme engineering that has gone into the Varèse system, producing what it claims is the finest digital sound on the planet.

The price is what dCS needs to charge to bring Varèse to market and it’s also the price an extremely well-heeled music lover will need to pay if they want to own the best of the best. If the Varèse was a car, it would probably be a 2017 LaFerrari Aperta which will set you back somewhere north of $3 million. That’s the price you must pay to push the boundaries of performance using radical technology and high-end engineering.

We may not all be able to afford a dCS Varèse system, but most audiophiles would probably want to hear what all the noise is about. It begins shipping from the dCS factory in Cambridge by the end of the year but nobody outside of dCS’s inner circle has had the opportunity to experience it yet. That changes this week.

This Friday and Saturday, November 29-30, HiFi Lounge—one of only two top-tier audio dealers chosen to represent the Varèse in the U.K., alongside Guildford Audio—is holding exclusive demonstrations at its premises in Bedfordshire, in conjunction with dCS and their U.K. distributor Absolute Sounds.

There are just a few spaces left, so if you want to hear what this this envelope-pushing digital audio streaming system can do and talk to the brains behind it, you’ll need to move fast and email paul@hifilounge.co.uk.