@Joe Cohen
I have the impression that the concept of SW1X DACs is very similar to those of Audio Note UK.
How do they differentiate from AN?
Thanks
Matt
I wanted to get Slawa Roschkow’s answer to this question as I don’t yet have a grasp myself on those differences. Here is his reply,
”1. Good question! Between AN and SW1X, there is something very much in common and yet very different in our approaches.
All that is because AN Japan and UK were somewhat of my inspiration in the past.
More about it is stated in the interview here:
https://www.dagogo.com/interview-slawa-roschkow-sw1x-england/
Perhaps we share a similar school of thought (in our philosophy) but do have a different interpretation?
AN is now a large by the Hi End Audio standards company. We are on the other hand, are small.
Besides me, there are 2 assemblers and 2-3 engineers- that is it. We are like AN Japan back in the days in that aspect.
Besides that massive difference, I tried to implement many concepts my way- the way I see them. PQ and I (just like Kondo back in the days) have our different views on many things. That is refected in terms of materials choice and circuit design- it is all a question how one sees it.
Some folks see SW1X as a copy of AN UK because we have similarities in chassis design, level system and because there are some AN components inside our products. That ressemblance is only on the surface. If one looks a bit closer, one can see that we only have AN copper foil caps and sometimes a pair of Tantalum resistors or Kaisei caps. That is it- the vast majority of passive and active components are not related to AN. The only passive component AN makes in house is copper foil caps, FYI.
By the way, I am not a huge fan of Tantalum resistors or Kaisei caps (made by TKD and Rubycon) but I do like their Copper foil caps, therefore we offer these as an option. Apart from that there is really nothing taken from AN UK. OK, we also use tube amplifiaction, wooden/bakelite boards and we have zero digital filtering concept as well. However, there is somthing we have AN UK does not: Active I/V, tube based clocks and a discrete power supply with exotic semiconductors. We also offer much more custom tailored, customised products with a range of options unlike AN UK.
In other words we do have quite unique circuit design inside our products. Also, I prefer not to use too much silver wiring inside our digital products (amplification is a different subject). That is just my tonal preference as the sound gains more clarity it also loosing the body and also starts to reveal too much of digital imperfections.Some materials we do equally like to be used in our equipment such as tubes, silver, BG caps etc. but that does not make us a copy of AN. Other than that I do like the rich, analogue and organic sound character and do my best so that our equipment is capable of producing it.
Relative to AN, (SW1X) DAC III Balanced is akin to their DAC 4 but on steroids as we have power tubes (AN DAC 4 has low level signal triodes) in the output stage.
And we have DHD tube rectified power supply, which makes even a larger and more authorititve, punchier sound.
Also, on the digital side TDA1541 in the DAC III is powered by a tube, which makes the sound of our our DAC much more organic sounding.