Audio Note Fifth Element IZVOR

The Fifth Element IZVOR is the finest digital-to-analogue converter Audio Note UK has produced. Twelve years of development by Darko Greguras led to a discrete R2R ladder DAC built without a converter chip — the first DAC to use large, hand-soldered resistors in place of surface-mount silicon. Every board carries individually corrected values, making each one unique. There is no oversampling, no jitter reduction, no noise shaping and no re-clocking; all filtering happens in the analogue domain. The digital chassis pairs with the external Fifth Force valve power supply.