Radical Innovation, Exhilarating Realism

At dCS we strive to reproduce each aspect of a musical recording with absolute fidelity. This ethos has guided our work for over 35 years, driving the development of everything from our earliest digital converters to our current product range. We have devised some of the most sophisticated audio technologies available in our efforts to reveal the full impact of the music our listeners love – allowing them to appreciate the full breadth of detail and emotion in the works that inspire them.

As we’ve evolved from developing professional audio equipment to making high-performance music systems and separates, we’ve broadened our focus to explore how we can provide the most accurate sound and the most rewarding playback experience. As music lovers ourselves, we understand the importance of music in our customers’ lives and we aim to honour this with exceptional equipment that makes listening an even greater pleasure.

Our new system, dCS Varèse, embodies these philosophies. It is our most advanced music system to date and offers a level of performance beyond anything we’ve ever created. At the same time, it brings a simpler, more intuitive user experience and an ambitious design that marries cutting-edge mechanics and hardware with a striking and tactile form.  

Varèse is the culmination of a series of projects that began several years ago.

In addition to researching and developing updates to existing products, we had spent a great deal of time exploring how we could further improve the sonic and measured performance of our DACs. We’d also begun investigating whether we could develop a unified system to transport audio, timing and control signals and improve clocking arrangements between audio components.

Alongside this, we’d been considering how we could make it even easier and more rewarding for listeners to discover music and manage playback, conducting interviews with dCS owners around the world and exploring what future music interfaces could look like.

As these strands of research converged, we decided to embark on an ambitious project to reinterpret the dCS experience for a new era – devising a complete playback system that reimagines how we interact with and listen to music.

The Varèse Music System comprises five components: a Core; a User Interface, an optional Master Clock, and two Mono DACs – one for each audio channel. It also includes a dedicated Varèse Remote Control and a new app, dCS Mosaic ACTUS.  A dedicated CD/SACD Transport will also be available from 2025.

Varèse utilises a suite of new technologies that have enabled us to further enhance performance and deliver sound with even greater precision and clarity.  

These include dCS Tomix, a patented new clocking technology: ACTUS, a bespoke interface that carries audio, control and timing signals between components; and the Differential Ring DAC, a new version of the dCS Ring DAC™ that represents the biggest change to our DAC architecture in a generation.

Varèse also features several mechanical and electronic innovations, from new circuit design to enhanced power supplies. The benefits of these advancements are wide-ranging: we’ve further reduced jitter, whilst increasing linearity, lowering noise floor and eliminating crosstalk, once again setting a new standard for measured performance in the process.

For music listeners, Varèse offers all the qualities people have come to expect from dCS on an even grander scale, building on the exceptional capabilities of our current range to deliver a new level of realism. Listeners have noted an even broader, more expansive soundstage; an increased sense of effortlessness, musicality, and rhythmic flow; even more tangible vocals; improved texture, timing, and impact of bass instruments; and enhanced speed and tunefulness at lower frequencies, among other qualities.

Each person's experience is unique, but there's one thing that all who have encountered Varèse agree: it has the ability to connect them even more intimately with their music. Varèse's many innovations combine to provide the most transcendent dCS experience to date, bringing listeners a performance where sound has a more palpable presence than ever before.

Developing Varèse has been a huge undertaking for the entire team at dCS: “[Varèse] is the most challenging undertaking of our careers in audio,” said dCS Managing Director David Steven. “We set out to redesign state-of-the-art whilst at the same time creating an entirely new and immersive user experience. We knew we had to embrace a singular vision, and be brave and relentless in our pursuit of this, to bring listeners a system that is measurably and demonstrably special and exceeds the capabilities of our current body of work.” 

Andy McHarg, Technical Director at dCS, added: “I’ve been at dCS for over 30 years, working across every major project for audio professionals and consumers. I think it’s fair to say that Varèse is the most complicated and challenging project I’ve been involved in, but I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of the team and the system they have created.”

More information about Varèse and its supporting technologies will be published on dcsaudio.com on August 9.  

We’ll provide an in-depth look at the system’s design over the next few months, with deep dives, whitepapers and videos showcasing the technologies and features that drive its performance. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest updates straight to your inbox.

Varèse will debut on static display at the Hong Kong AV show on August 9, before travelling to other events worldwide throughout 2024. Active demonstrations will take place in the UK and US from September 2024 onwards.

Visit the dCS Event Page for details.

Systems will be manufactured in limited quantities and shipping will commence from late 2024. 

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