R2R Design

The R-7 is a DAC R2R, a design that has become popular thanks to its undeniable sound qualities, especially when integrated into high-end products. While there are several methods for designing a DAC R2R that impact both performance and design complexity, Audio-GD continues to choose the highest quality as usual.

The design chosen by the brand switches the ultra-low tolerance resistors in parallel and an ultra-fast FPGA chip corrects the R2R scale. This design allows you to control and correct each bit distinctly to achieve incredible performance. In addition, with this parallel structure, a single clock cycle allows all the data to be processed, where a series connection would require 8 to 24. Thanks to this architecture, Audio-GD allows its R-7 to correct imperfections in basic R2R assemblies, i.e. those caused by resistance tolerance.

Main advantages of the DAC R2R Ladder discrete:

• The R2R does not convert the clock signal into the output signal.
• R2R is less sensitive to jitter.
• R2R provides a more accurate output signal.

Ultra fast signal processing

FPGA chips, now widely used in the audio world, allow full control of the hardware by a software layer. One of the major advantages of this technology is the ability to easily perform updates, thus allowing the device to be improved without necessarily having to replace components. It is therefore both an efficient and flexible solution.

In the R-7, the FPGA is responsible for 3 major points:

• The FPGA acts as an excellent high-performance SPDIF interface, much more efficient than a conventional chip.
• It allows a complete re-clocking with a FIFO design applicable to each input. In this way the output data is fully synchronized with the clock signal to greatly reduce jitter.
• The FPGA also includes 2x, 4x and 8x oversampling, digital filters and 4 different NOS modes.