Lina Network DAC

Description

The Lina Network DAC is both a continuation and a new beginning. Its design combines renowned dCS technologies with new innovations developed for headphone listeners – resulting in a bold new interpretation of the dCS experience, and a complete reimagining of form and function.

With the Lina Network Streaming DAC, dCS taken their core playback technologies, including the dCS Ring DAC™ and Digital Processing Platform, and added new innovations developed for headphone listeners. These include their first ever touch-screen display, a streamlined user interface for easier navigation, and a powerful flex-rigid circuit board, which allows dCS to deliver all of the features you’d expect from a dCS DAC in a much smaller chassis.

The result is a powerful, supremely capable product designed for use in a wide range of environments, from living rooms to studios and workspaces. With its wide dynamic range, crisp, clear playback, expansive soundstage, and tonal neutrality, it provides a deeply natural, highly detailed, and profoundly musical sound that encapsulates our singular approach to audio.

Add unique headphone optimisation technology, an elegant and tactile design, and a high-performance streaming platform, and you have a hugely versatile source that delivers spectacular sound, however you choose to listen. Designed to inspire, inform and entertain, it will give you a whole new perspective on the artists and recordings you love.

Key Features

• dCS Ring DAC™ system and Digital Processing Platform ensure audio is reproduced with absolute integrity, for a highly detailed, musical and deeply natural sound
• Patented dCS Expanse technology offers enhanced headphone optimisation, for a more natural and immersive experience when listening to a wide range of stereo recordings
• dCS Mosaic platform supports hi-res streaming via Roon, Spotify, Deezer, Qobuz, TIDAL, Internet Radio and Apple AirPlay
• Touch screen UI with customisable menu allows listeners to easily control playback and adjust system settings
• Flexible firmware provides unlimited scope for future upgrades, with new features and enhancements delivered via simple software updates
• All-new electronic and mechanical design delivers a vast range of features in a compact and elegant format

Effortless listening
While the Lina Network DAC offers a vast range of features, it is designed with simplicity, convenience and ease of use in mind. Its streamlined user interface allows you to easily navigate system settings, select music and manage your playback experience, while the dCS Mosaic app offers an intuitive and painless way to browse and access music from multiple sources and audio libraries. With a choice of inputs and outputs, user selectable filters, it allows you to seamlessly enjoy audio from any source, in any format, without compromise.

Unlimited potential
The Lina Network DAC’s performance is driven by a completely flexible control board – the dCS Digital Processing Platform. This powerful, robust and highly intelligent system operates on code written by dCS engineers, and it can be endlessly updated to deliver any number of new features and enhancements. This means we are able to continue upgrading Lina’s performance over time, and ensure that each system delivers a state of the art experience long after it’s purchased.

Scrupulous design
Crafted from billet Aluminium (a material selected for its excellent acoustic properties), the Lina Network DAC has been meticulously designed to deliver the finest possible sound, with the lowest possible levels of distortion and noise. Each aspect of its design – from its billet Aluminium casework, to its internal fixings and components, and proprietary hardware and software – is carefully engineered and exhaustively tested to ensure it provides the best possible experience, and the highest levels of quality and reliability. This holistic approach and obsessive attention to detail is one of the reasons that dCS DACs sound so sublime.

Incredible sound
At the heart of all dCS DACs is the Ring DAC™: a proprietary digital-to-analogue conversation system renowned for its ultra-wide bandwidth, technical accuracy, and ability to reveal astonishing levels of detail in digital recordings – from the subtlest of sounds, to the sense of time and harmonic movement, and the atmosphere that surrounds a musical performance. This unique component is an integral part of our systems, and remains unrivalled in its sonic and technical abilities.

Extraordinary technology
At the heart of Lina’s design is a powerful flex-rigid circuit board housing over 2,000 individual components. Designed by dCS engineers, this extraordinary piece of technology allows us to combine all of Lina’s core functions and features on to a single circuit. This not only saves space, it also allows us to deliver an incredibly clean signal path, which is essential for great audio.

Enhanced optimisation
Available to all Lina Network DAC owners, dCS Expanse is a unique headphone processing platform which offers an enhanced version of crossfeed optimisation. With its unique multi-stage processing method, Expanse optimises audio while preserving the reverberation in a recording (something that is crucial to helping us localise sounds, and establish a sense of space and depth.) Accessed via two optional settings, it can provide a heightened sense of realism when listening to a wide range of stereo recordings.