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| dCS Varèse reimagines playback for a new era, utilising a suite of new innovations to bring listeners an even more immersive and revealing musical experience...
 
At dCS we strive to reproduce each aspect of a musical recording with absolute fidelity. This ethos has guided our work for over 35 years, driving the development of everything from our earliest digital converters to our current product range. We have devised some of the most sophisticated audio technologies available in our efforts to reveal the full impact of the music our listeners love – allowing them to appreciate the full breadth of detail and emotion in the works that inspire them.

As we’ve evolved from developing professional audio equipment to making high-performance music systems and separates, we’ve broadened our focus to explore how we can provide the most accurate sound and the most rewarding playback experience. As music lovers ourselves, we understand the importance of music in our customers’ lives and we aim to honour this with exceptional equipment that makes listening an even greater pleasure.

Our new system, dCS Varèse, embodies these philosophies. It is our most advanced music system to date and offers a level of performance beyond anything we’ve ever created. At the same time, it brings a simpler, more intuitive user experience and an ambitious design that marries cutting-edge mechanics and hardware with a striking and tactile form.



 

| Reinterpreting the dCS experience
  Varèse is the culmination of a series of projects that began several years ago.

In addition to researching and developing updates to existing products, we had spent a great deal of time exploring how we could further improve the sonic and measured performance of our DACs. We’d also begun investigating whether we could develop a unified system to transport audio, timing and control signals and improve clocking arrangements between audio components.

Alongside this, we’d been considering how we could make it even easier and more rewarding for listeners to discover music and manage playback, conducting interviews with dCS owners around the world and exploring what future music interfaces could look like.

As these strands of research converged, we decided to embark on an ambitious project to reinterpret the dCS experience for a new era – devising a complete playback system that reimagines how we interact with and listen to music.
 



 

| The Varèse Music System
  The Varèse Music System comprises five components: a Core; a User Interface, an optional Master Clock, and two Mono DACs – one for each audio channel. It also includes a dedicated Varèse Remote Control and a new app, dCS Mosaic ACTUS.
   
| New technologies & innovations
  | Varèse Mono DACs

The Varèse Music System utilises a Mono DAC configuration with a dedicated DAC for each audio channel (left and right). This configuration allows us to deliver a number of benefits — such as improving the power supplies within each DAC and enhancing cross talk performance.The Mono DACs utilise our new ACTUS and dCS Tomix technologies to deliver a superior sonic and measured performance with excellent local clocking, bit-perfect audio transmission and total system control. Each DAC features a dedicated Differential Ring DACTM system — a new version of the dCS Ring DAC that brings improvements in noise floor and linearity.

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Mono DAC Power Supplies

The Varèse Mono DACs feature new, improved hybrid power supplies for enhanced performance.

> The twin transformers inside each Mono DAC have been optimised for analogue and digital operations.

>  Secondary power supply circuits have been redesigned to reduce magnetostriction in the transformer core and the mechanical hum this can create.

>  Power supply regulators utilise a power management chip to achieve power sequencing — bringing tighter and more flexible control of supply activation and deactivation.

>  Additional regulation is provided for the analogue supplies serving the balanced output stage, allowing us to further reduce common mode noise at that output.


| Differential Ring DAC

The Differential Ring DAC is a new iteration of the dCS Ring DAC. There is a Differential Ring DAC inside each Varèse Mono DAC.

The Differential Ring DAC features 96 current sources for each audio channel. This means the Varèse Mono DACs have twice as many current sources for each audio channel as other dCS DACs.

In the Varèse Mono DACs, 48 current sources produce the analogue signal in the correct phase and 48 produce the same signal in antiphase. The outputs of these two sets of current sources is differenced, meaning the phase of the antiphase current sources is reversed and summed together with the correct phase current sources. This makes the Mono DACs inherently balanced in several areas, including residual noise, power supply draw summing node DC offset.

The differential design also improves on harmonic performance and allows us to further increase linearity while significantly lowering noise floor. This, in turn, brings significant sonic benefits - allowing us to once again elevate the musical experience we provide.


| ACTUS Audio Control & Timing Unified System

ACTUS is a bespoke interface developed by dCS to radically simplify system setup whilst ensuring ultimate audio quality.

The ACTUS interface delivers audio, control and timing signals between Varèse components.
This enables the Varèse Music System to be connected with a single cable running from each unit to the Core.

dCS ACTUS cables carry asynchronous and error corrected digital audio, control signals, and a master clock signal send via our proprietary Tomix interface.


| dCS Tomix

Tomix is a patented clocking technology developed by dCS engineers.

Its creation allows us to harness the sonic benefits of a Mono DAC arrangement within the Varèse Music System whilst maintaining the strict standards we have set for clocking performance.

Tomix ensures the clocks within each Mono DAC are tightly synchronised. This, in turn, allows us to ensure the left and right channels of each audio sample are converted at exactly the right moment, whilst also making sure that the Ring DAC operations within each DAC are tightly controlled via the DAC’s internal clock circuitry.



 

| A more palpable presence
  For music listeners, Varèse offers all the qualities people have come to expect from dCS on an even grander scale, building on the exceptional capabilities of our current range to deliver a new level of realism. Listeners have noted an even broader, more expansive soundstage; an increased sense of effortlessness, musicality, and rhythmic flow; even more tangible vocals; improved texture, timing, and impact of bass instruments; and enhanced speed and tunefulness at lower frequencies, among other qualities.

Each person's experience is unique, but there's one thing that all who have encountered Varèse agree: it has the ability to connect them even more intimately with their music. Varèse's many innovations combine to provide the most transcendent dCS experience to date, bringing listeners a performance where sound has a more palpable presence than ever before.
   
| A singular vision
  Developing Varèse has been a huge undertaking for the entire team at dCS: “[Varèse] is the most challenging undertaking of our careers in audio,” said dCS Managing Director David Steven. “We set out to redesign state-of-the-art whilst at the same time creating an entirely new and immersive user experience. We knew we had to embrace a singular vision, and be brave and relentless in our pursuit of this, to bring listeners a system that is measurably and demonstrably special and exceeds the capabilities of our current body of work.”
   
| Varèse Specifications > DOWNLOAD
| Varèse Brochure > DOWNLOAD
| Varèse Technologies Innovations Overview > DOWNLOAD
| Prijslijst > DOWNLOAD
   



“ I think it's fair to say Varèse is the most complicated and
challenging project I've been involved in... ”

Andy McHarg, Technical Director at dCS, added: “I’ve been at dCS for over 30 years, working across every major project for audio professionals and consumers. I think it’s fair to say that Varèse is the most complicated and challenging project I’ve been involved in, but I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of the team and the system they have created.”

   
 

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