Review: dCS Bartok DAC / HeadAmp For Headphones And Stereo Systems

dCS’ Bartók has a built-in music streamer and can access Tidal and Qobuz and can be used with Roon and other libraries/players or dCS’ Mosaic Control software. Roon recognized the unit immediately and streamed seamlessly during my evaluation of the Bartók. Separate digital filters are provided for PCM and DSD with the ability to preset a different filter for each sample rate. There are seven different filters for PCM, including one that is specific to MQA and works in conjunction with the other filters. The Bartók also provides you with four choices of DSD filter (most DACs don’t offer this) which allows the user to decide whether to trade bandwidth for “out-of-band” noise. Not only that, but dCS furthermore provides you with two choices of upsampling; DXD and DSD. In DXD mode the DAC uses its standard PCM oversampling sequence for PCM and DSD is unaffected. In DSD mode, PCM is upconverted to DSD using the chosen PCM filter and then the DSD filter is applied.
—> Read our dCS Bartok DAC / HeadAmp review here.