A Year in Review

Welcome to our fifth Year in Review – it seems both eons and almost no time at all since we sat down to write our last annual roundup of news and updates from dCS, yet here we are fast approaching the end of 2024.

It’s been an eventful 12 months for the entire team here, with much of this year spent working on Varèse, our most advanced music system yet. We also attended over 50 audio shows worldwide, released a new silver edition of our dCS Lina series, and collaborated with some wonderful manufacturers and music professionals, as well as exploring how we can further enhance and develop our current product range. Here, we look back on some of the projects we’ve been working on and extend our thanks to all those who’ve supported us throughout 2024… 

Our most significant undertaking this year was of course the launch of dCS Varèse: a new digital playback system made possible through several multi-year development projects. Varèse began with an ambition to advance audio performance whilst at the same time simplifying system setup and control – delivering an even more immersive musical experience.

This led us to embark on some of our boldest and most complex challenges yet: creating a new clocking protocol (Tomix), a unified audio, control and timing interface (ACTUS), and a new Ring DAC architecture, whilst at the same time designing a new user interface and physical touchpoints (the Varèse UI, Mosaic ACTUS app and Remote Control).

It is difficult to overstate what an enormous undertaking Varèse has been for the team here at dCS. There is a huge amount of research, time and effort that goes into making a system of this magnitude, and we’d be lying if there hadn’t been moments where we’d questioned what we’d got ourselves into, but from our first listening sessions with Varèse prototypes, we knew we were on to something special.

We’ve all been moved here at the heightened sense of presence and immediacy Varèse brings, giving us the sense of being drawn even further into recordings we know very well, and it’s been a real joy to see other people sharing that same sentiment during our Varèse demonstrations. We’ve been incredibly moved by people’s reactions at global listening events – seeing people moved to tears, and spending several hours engrossed in their music reminds us of the reason we work so hard to continue improving and advancing digital audio.

Of course, anyone who knows us will know that launching a product like this is just the beginning: over the next few months we’ll be studying feedback from customers and listeners to identify how and where we can continue to improve, whilst also working on the Varèse CD/SACD Transport and Digital I/O Module ahead of their launch in early 2025. In addition, we’ll be looking closely at other potential applications of the new innovations we’ve developed with Varèse – as well as preparing and shipping many more systems to customers and retail partners around the world.

This year has brought some fantastic opportunities to meet with audio enthusiasts and manufacturers worldwide, with our team travelling to over 50 events in cities across the US and Europe as well as China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines.

In February, we travelled to CanJam New York, and caught up with Susan Rogers – a former recording engineer for Prince – who delivered a fascinating talk on psychoacoustics in the Lina lounge space. We took dCS to some of the world’s busiest high-end shows, from Munich to the HK AV Show, Warsaw and IHEAC, hosted multiple in-store listening events across France with our distribution partners PPL, had a wonderful time with Advance Audio at the StereoNet Hi-Fi & AV Show in Melbourne, and spent many weeks meeting with listeners and retailers across China in collaboration with Richcom AV, to list just some of our global adventures. 

We also attended several Varèse launch events in the US, and held the system’s UK premiere at the fantastic Hi-Fi Lounge in November. We always look forward to meeting other audiophiles, owners and manufacturers, and each event we’ve attended has had its own distinct atmosphere - reflecting the fantastic community of organisers, exhibitors and attendees in each location. 

We’re very grateful to our distributors and retailers who worked hard to provide a positive experience for people wishing to listen to dCS, and we hope everyone who came along to our talks and demonstrations enjoyed themselves. 

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to everyone who attended one of our Varèse launch events, and to the retailers who exercised enormous care and attention in providing a warm and welcoming atmosphere. It really was an honour to see the excitement and anticipation surrounding our latest endeavour, and to meet with listeners who had travelled a considerable distance to hear it.

We have many more events scheduled for 2025 – you can keep up to date with upcoming shows and listening demonstrations via our Events Page.

Alongside hitting the road it was an enormous pleasure to open our doors this summer and invite over 30 journalists, distributors and retailers to the dCS factory in Cambridgeshire. We held a series of private unveiling events for our global sales and distribution partners, allowing them to hear Varèse first-hand and view early prototypes, whilst also learning more about the system ahead of its global launch.

We also welcomed some dCS owners to listen and give their feedback on the system, including Hi-Fi+ contributor Paul Soor and Mohammed Samji of Part-Time Audiophile (read Paul’s first impressions here and Mohammed’s here). For the team working behind the scenes at dCS, these events offer a wonderful opportunity to share our passion for what we do, and we’re always happy to facilitate on-site visits and factory tours where possible. Now our work on Varèse has been revealed, we’re hoping to host many more visits throughout 2025…

In addition to a new system launch, we shared a new look for an existing dCS product, with the release of Lina silver in January. The Lina Network DAC, Master Clock and Headphone Amplifier are all now available in our signature shade of silver, meaning listeners can choose from a black or silver finish when purchasing components. The additional colourway allows listeners to purchase Lina components in the same shade as other dCS products – including our Bartók, Rossini and Vivaldi ranges – making the Lina series even more versatile.

Lina Silver components are available to purchase now through dCS dealers and distributors. Head to our Dealer Locator page to find a retailer in your region. 

We’re always looking at new ways to collaborate with people and organisations who share our passion for music and audio, and one of our favourite projects this year was a design collaboration that saw four headphone manufacturers put their own custom stamp on the Lina Headphone Amplifier.

As many of you know, we’ve been attending CanJam events in various locations for the past few years, bringing dCS Lina to Dallas, SoCal, New York and London. During this time we’ve really enjoyed getting to know some fantastic people working in the headfi space to build top quality products. This year, we decided to celebrate that by inviting our friends at ABYSS, Meze, Audeze and ZMF to design custom fascia designs for the Lina Headphone Amplifier. ZMF used walnut burl wood, Meze referenced their roots with the Romanian knot, Audeze opted for a geometric approach featuring their logo, and Abyss opted for a striking blue abalone finish. Our partners have since taken their custom designs on the road to both Dallas and SoCal – giving them a unique design that complements their products and space.

Alongside this, we’ve started a new guest playlist series showcasing listening recommendations from accomplished musician and music professionals – including percussionist Bex Burch and saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael – and have continued to curate regular playlists of outstanding new music in collaboration with critics Charlotte Gardner and Sharon O’Connell. (Read their latest Classical Choices and New Music roundups over at the dCS Edit.)

We continued our Bartók Masters series with a short film featuring esteemed classical pianist Nicolas Hodges, and travelled to the Sage & Scientists Symposium in Harvard to hear composer Josh Ralph play a moving recording of his wonderful piece Theodora on a Vivaldi APEX system. It’s a wonderfully moving piece, featuring some fantastic performances from members of the London Symphony Orchestra – and it sounded fantastic played through the Vivaldi. We’ll be sharing more information on Theodora and Josh’s appearance at Sages & Scientists with the Vivaldi APEX in the new year.

Following 11 award wins in 2023, we were thrilled to see the dCS Lina, Bartók, Rossini and Vivaldi all receive further accolades in 2024. Stereophile magazine awarded an A+ award to Vivaldi APEX, Rossini APEX, Bartók APEX and Lina in its 2024 Recommended Components issue; the dCS Lina Network DAC received an Outstanding Product award from hi-fi news in October; Rossini was named Stereonet’s CD/SACD Player of the Year, and both Vivaldi APEX and Bartók APEX received 2024 Golden Ear Awards from The Absolute Sound magazine. As dCS owners will know we are committed to upgrading products throughout their lifespan and ensuring that our systems continue to deliver a state-of-the-art performance, so it’s wonderful to see Vivaldi, Rossini, Bartók and Lina receiving this kind of recognition and feedback from reviewers who spend a great deal of time listening and assessing high-performance equipment.

Of course, this year also brought its more difficult moments – and we feel it’s important to reflect on those too. Most of you will be aware of a situation this summer that began with a dispute regarding a review of a dCS product.

We have spoken at length about this incident - you can find detailed posts on the dCS forum detailing the steps we have taken to address the damage caused and reach an amicable resolution with the content creator involved, but it goes without saying that we remain deeply regretful of how things escalated. This incident does not reflect the values that we have sought to uphold in our interactions with people over the past four decades in audio. We have made personnel changes , reviewed and changed internal processes, and drawn up new guidelines so that our interactions are always managed in a positive, open and constructive manner.  We have also created internal protocols to ensure that we have clear systems in place to support independent reviews of dCS equipment.

We have always supported accurate, independent reviews of our products and this will never change, so we are determined to learn from this situation and continue building positive relationships with reviewers and content creators around the world.

Before we close out the year, we’d like to say a huge thank you to all our retailers, collaborators, partners, friends and customers for your continued support this year. We have pushed ourselves to the absolute limits to bring Varèse into the world, whilst continuing to support, build and ship our existing product range – and we really hope that all those who’ve experienced Varèse understand why we have invested in making a system of this scope and scale. We truly believe that it offers an incredibly special and unique musical experience and we can’t wait for more people to experience Varèse in 2025.

Going forward, we’ll continue to explore how other dCS owners can benefit from some of our latest innovations – as we’ve done already with APEX and the Lina Network DAC (both of which stemmed from work on Varèse).

We also have several exciting projects on the horizon for early 2025, from product developments to a collaboration involving some inspiring voices in music, and we’ll be sharing details of these projects with you very soon. 

For now, we hope all those of you reading this have a wonderful break over the festive season, and we wish you all the very best for the year ahead.