Michael Wollny Trio’s Wartburg is a live album that I’ve been enjoying a lot lately, it’s got really deep bass and lots of detail in a recording with an unusually low noise floor, here the CDA2 revealed itself to be an unusually transparent DAC (using a USB input from the Zenith SE) that is also very well timed. ATC like power after all, how bad a match could it be? Not so bad at all it turned out, positively musical in fact when I put on Macey Gray’s ‘Annabelle’ where the brushes on the snare drum had lots of texture and presence and the high guitar notes were beautifully open and airy. Just because we reviewers are a perverse lot I started off listening to this not with my usual ATC P2 power amplifier but with an AVM called SA 8.2, a 450 Watt per channel beast that happened to be in the system at the time. It’s not obvious but there is also a headphone jack, it’s hidden on the back of the box so fine if you can access the rear panel but a fiddle if you can’t.
It also comes in a full width case with a nicely machined front panel and proper buttons for all functions, there is also a remote control that mirrors most of these and adds track access buttons for CD, it doesn’t have buttons for all inputs however. Unlike a lot of the competition this incorporates a proper analogue preamplifier circuit albeit one with only two inputs, but with output stages that would drive a train, look at the output voltages available: that's studio quality line driving ability. There’s plenty of technical explanation on the company’s website so I won’t go into it here save to say that the results back up the spiel, this is a remarkably revealing DAC/preamp. Electrical noise is the enemy of digital audio as products like the Innuos Zenith SE prove and ATC have paid close attention to keeping it as low as possible by building a new power supply with nine extra voltage regulators above those in the original CDA2.ĪTC has also refined the in- and output gain stages with discrete op-amps that provide buffering of inputs and a true balanced output from the XLR connections, the output stage itself being biased in Class A. You can stick a hi-res DAC chip into any converter and get it to work but to make it sound good you need to make all the supporting electronics that much quieter and more precise. ATC’s schtick is tried and tested engineering but this product proves that this ethos fits alongside audiophile ambitions like high resolution.
The more significant upgrade to the CDA2 is a new DAC board to which the aforementioned USB input connects and which can convert PCM up to 384kHz and DSD up to four times or DSAD256, which is quite a big number for a company that doesn’t usually compete on specs.
The disc drive mechanism on the CDA2 Mk2 is from TEAC who are pretty well the only supplier of CD specific transports on the market, I must admit that it didn’t get a lot of use in my system but proved itself to be a useful source for instant access to unripped discs.
And lets face it, we all have plenty of CDs that should be played and quite large segments of the worldwide audio market have yet to adopt streaming. Presumably ATC’s market still wants them or it has figured out that with the supply drying up they can meet the demand that exists.
It’s an odd product though, how many other CD player/DAC/preamps are there on the market, there are plenty of DAC preamps but the notion is that people have stopped buying CD players. The only external difference between the new CDA2 and its predecessor is the arrival of a USB socket where there used to be two more SPDIF inptus on the back panel, but inside nearly everything has been overhauled, and you can hear it.
ATC aren’t into change for changes sake, they won’t revise the range every year or so just to refresh its profile in the market, indeed even when they give something a major overhaul as is the case here the appearance remains much the same.