Mass against resonance
The chassis is entirely our own design. Top and bottom are 6 mm, the sides 12 mm, the back 10 mm and the front a solid 25 mm of aluminium to aerospace standard 6061. The different wall thicknesses break up chassis resonances, and micro-vibrations no longer reach the sensitive components. The sound gains calm and contour, the bass gains authority.
At just under 20 kg, the Pirol weighs twice as much as the Stereoplayer. It stands on elaborately decoupled precision feet that isolate it from the surface below and keep structure-borne noise from the rack away. We machine the control knob from solid stainless steel.
A DAC without a chip
More than 90% of all modern converters are built on highly integrated standard chipsets. The apolitan DISCRETE PURE DSD DAC in the Pirol takes its own path: it is 100% discrete, with no DAC chip and no FPGA merely emulating one. Conversion is handled by selected precision components, not by ICs that colour the sound.
Pure DSD reproduces impulses and transients as unfiltered as conventional PCM converters can hardly manage. The result is analog authenticity and a natural musical flow.
The DAC was developed in close cooperation with digital pioneer Pavel Pogodin. Directly before conversion, the signal is galvanically isolated and reclocked with NDK precision crystals. 29 dedicated voltage regulators supply the circuit with low noise and high stability. Roon handles upsampling up to DSD512, so the signal reaches the converter untouched.
Handmade in Germany. No marketing by measurement, just pure emotion.
The DAC in a Faraday vault
In the Stereoplayer, the DAC sat openly inside the chassis. In the Pirol it has its own vault of 3 mm stainless steel, fully lined inside and out with pure copper. This sandwich keeps high-frequency noise away just as it does alternating magnetic fields. You hear it as a deep black background and a vivid sense of depth.
The mainboard is shielded as well. Every unused slot carries a 3 mm stainless steel cover, so it cannot act as an antenna for stray radiation. The signal stays clean, and transients come through with more precision.
Two power supplies, two tasks
The analog section is fed by a custom audio-grade toroidal transformer with a minimized stray field. It sits as far from the DAC board as possible. This clearly reduces 50 Hz hum and induced eddy currents. The finest reverb tails and decays are preserved.
For the digital section we use a fully enclosed switch-mode supply followed by a dedicated filter board. In the Stereoplayer, residual ripple was a typical 120 mV; in the Pirol it is 5 to 7 mV. That is power on the level of very good linear supplies, with the impulse speed of a switch-mode design. The treble sounds silky and stays free of fatigue even over long listening sessions.
Connections
On the analog side, the Pirol outputs its signal balanced via XLR or via RCA, selectable per channel with a switch. Two USB 3.0 ports are available for data. In addition there is Ethernet, two USB ports for the DAC and a service connection.
All digital connections are built as rugged Neutrik panel-mount connectors.
