Linnenberg Vivace DAC and Unisono DC Performance Pack
Introduction Linnenberg is not a name that is familiar to me. Yet, the company has been around for more than 20 years, manufacturing their equipment wholly in Germany (a rarity in today's world of outsourced production). The product lineup is modest, with a headamp, DAC, DAC / headamp and linear power supply. Description The Vivace DAC is a half-width component which is modest only in size and weight. The heart of the Vivace is the ESS 9018 Sabre DAC chip. Other noteworthy features include a femto master clock (82 femto seconds of jitter), a galvanically isolated USB circuit and a S/PDIF jitter reduction circuit. Passive I/V conversion is done using a zero feedback circuit utilising precision resistors and an ultra low noise transistor. The Vivace has two coaxial inputs and an asynchronous USB input. The coaxial inputs are limited to a maximum of 192 kHz sampling rate, while the USB input accepts all sampling frequencies up to 384 kHz. Both DSD64 and DSD128 are supported. The analo...