OmegaStar DAC

The Abso!ute Sound has awarded our OmegaStar DAC their prestigious Golden Ear Award for being one of the very best audio products of the year. Read all about it in the December 2002/January 2003 issue of The Abso!ute Sound.

Price: $899 Circuits: OmegaStar DAC Chassis: SF

Breaththrough engineering

The OmegaStar DAC is designed using the circuit simulation and math capability we have been developing for the past 15 years. Thousands of hours of original advanced math and circuit analysis programing went into modeling the complete circuit from digital input to audio output. Our results show, more clearly than ever before, every nuance of the circuit performance.

This allowed us to understand all significant (and not otherwise predictable) non-linearities, and then model improvements into the circuit. After multiple iterations of improvement, testing, modeling, and analyzing, we are convinced the circuit is as perfect as possible. Thus was born the OmegaStar DAC, easily the best piece of solid-state audio equipment we have ever designed, and likely the best at any price from any audio manufacturer.

It provides a source for your audio system so pure and real that it makes any system all new again and gives you music more lifelike than you ever thought possible. Musicality and inner detail are breathtaking. You must experience the performance—intelligibility, space, definition, absence of fatigue, and purity of voices—to believe this kind of music from digital. Gone are the grainy and hard artefacts that have come to be associated with digital audio. What remains is an utterly dynamic, liquid, and pristine look into the music.

Only at Audio by Van Alstine, a digital-to-analog converter has been engineered without compromise. We have evaluated available converter and filter chips and selected digital components that can output a completely symmetrical waveform. This top-to-bottom and left-to-right symmetry is necessary to correctly recover all of the digital data. A multibit oversampling design is used because conventional 1-bit processors are still too slow to accurately convert high frequency information. AVA’s uniquely pure digital designs are followed by our hybrid current-buffered ultra-high-speed audio filter/amplifiers to make sure all the music, and nothing but the music, gets to you.

All you need to have astonishing CD musicality is a good-tracking CD or DVD player with a coaxial digital output and the OmegaStar DAC. A single interconnect cable goes from the digital out on your CD or DVD player (bypassing all of its compromised converter and analog circuits) to the digital input on the OmegaStar DAC. Connect the left and right line outputs from the OmegaStar DAC to a set of line inputs on your preamp or receiver and prepare to be amazed.

It simply obsoletes all other DACs, including our previous Omega III, Omega IV and Fet Valve TOPP-DACs. Note: Your existing Omega III, Omega IV, or Fet Valve DAC can be upgraded to provide ultimate performance.

Factory-wired in the SF chassis, 17" wide, 12" deep, 3.5" high, 12 pounds. Mute circuit standard.

Audio Authority 977R Adaptor

For CD and Laser Disc players with TOSLINK optical outputs only, we offer the Audio Authority 977R optical-to-coax converter for $75 that will interface with the RCA coaxial input on the OmegaStar TOPP-DAC. We did not build that extra cost into the DAC itself as coax is best and most won’t need optical converters. The Audio Authority 977R adaptor comes complete with their matching 805-002 power pack and their 801-047 two foot optical cable.

Customer reviews of the previous model Omega IV DAC.