Philips DAC960

All but forgotten nowadays - but this is the unit that would lead to a well remembered and sought-after Marantz d/a converter : CDA-94 and their (many) LHH-1000 equivalents, like the export-only CD-12 combo.

The DAC960 was the original, before BitStream, and before Philips would gradually delegate its highend audio duties to Marantz only.
In fact, br minor board rearrangements, the DAC960 IS a CDA-94 from front to back !

No differences but the looks : black is black with a nicely naive frequency display and a beautiful green-backlit variable output volume knob.
Compared to the Marantz, this however strongly bears its period and is, let's face it, fairly ugly.


Hardware-wise, however, this was no mere afterthought : triple transformers, two dedicated transformers for the balanced outputs and TDA-1541A in DAC3 circuit.
An absolute phase switch is present, just like (real sci-fi at the time) an optical TOS input.

Even if barely available in 1988, a monitor loop for a DAT recorder was implemented as well.
32Khz for Digital Radio decoding is accepted - just as barely available.

The future was bright and soon all sources were to be digital - so the DAC960 doubles in fact as a preamplifier.
In retrospect, the future was bright indeed as nobody was yet hassled with SCMS, DRMs or any other such nice nasties : if digital sure was expensive then, it still was free.

The DAC960 was made to complement the CD960 CD player - another hoogtepunt in Philips' history.


Nudies aplenty of a DAC960 (aka CDA-94) here.