Around four years ago, I reviewes the great Reference DAC, which could be equipped with various input and output modules. Shortly afterwards, MSB added the Digital Director to its converters, a concept that Jonathan and Daniel Gullman explained to Roland Dietl. The culmination of the various new approaches is now the Cascade DAC.

For example while the modules for the digital inputs of the Reference DAC, which can be used to configure the converter according to its owner's requirements, are housed in the same casing as MSB's own "Hybrid DACs MKII" - more on this below - they are located in the casing of the so-called Digital Director of the Cascade DAC. The Cascade is not a single device, but a system consisting of three individual components. First, there is the Director, which is also responsible for operation: the four buttons and the elegant rotary knob on the top of the device can be used to select the inputs, adjust the volume and make settings in the menu. The front of the Director is adorned with a large, brightness-adjustable LED display that is also easy to read from a distance. It is updated in time with the audio clock, whose time reference is provided by the femto clock, to ensure that the analog system is not affected by harmful digital noise that would otherwise be generated by the display. The display with its associated circuitry is housed in a separat cavity in the CNC-milled housing block. This is to ensure optimum high-frequency insulation.

In addition to the input modules, the display and the control elements, the Director also houses an analog power supply and two high-performance DSPs with the associated FPGAs, each of which can perform 12 billion computing operations per second – that's four times the performance of the previous DAC generation. This much computing power makes it possible to use new, significantly longer digital filters, which MSB has tailored specifically to the hardware of the Cascade DACs. In an interview, Jonathan and Daniel Gullman, the sons of MSB company founder and now managing director and product developer,, explained to Roland Dietl that MSB had offered various filters to choose from in the early days, but that customers wanted the one "right" filter. That is why they have now taken on the task of listening to different filters and then refining the best one. The aim was by no means to always achieve a pleasant sound. Instruments can also sound rough if they do so in the original. The aim is for the DAC to play "correctly" and true to the original.