Dietmar final statement about the high frequency noise of the TRINITY DAC:
“I have spent a lot of money and time to optimize the DAC for the lowest possible high frequency noise, since the TRINITY DAC has no active low-pass filter behind the current to voltage converter and caused by the LINAOTEC architecture there are 8 times more DAC ICs, which need a clock.
Actually I had designed 5 different PCBs with different grounding schemes and ground return paths around the signal lines. Neither a supply voltage line nor a digital line is crossing the analog signal paths to avoid any cross-coupling.
As you can see on the enclosed picture the inherent noise of a DSD signal is much higher than the noise of the TRINITY DAC if we consider a bandwidth of 20MHz. The measurement set-up is not ideal, since I have no native DSD test tones and had to convert a PCM file for the measurement ( http://samplerateconverter.com ), but I am sure it is close to a very good DSD set-up.”
Therefore the most DSD DACs or SACD player have a 20kHz low-pass filter in the output stage to remove the quantization noise and that is the reason, why I am not a real big fan of DSD, only noise above 20kHz. For more information about quantization noise look here: http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/DSD.htm