Trinity Audio DAC, preamplifier and lately introduced power amplifiers are cousing quite a stir in upper echelon high-end audio circles around the world. Here is interesting Dieter text regarding Trinity preamplifier:
“This morning I had the pleasure to explain the difference between digital and analog volume control to a TRINITY DAC owner. So I am really happy, if people ask me and I can explain things like this. To make a long story very short, with every 6dB attenuation, you lose 1bit resolution. And if the recording was done with -6dB below full scale (like the Reference Recordings) you lose an additional bit. This is not good for CD with 16bit resolution and for high-res files with 24 bit we should be happy to have this resolution and not use it for a digital volume control.”
This week I got the newest audio analyser from AP (the first screen shoots were done with a prototype) and I think, I should share the first measurements with you, which show how excellent the volume control in the TRINITY preamp is realized. First of all the preamp is even better then specified with my “old” R&S analyser, which was excellent down to 120dB (0.0001%), but this one goes even lower as you could see below -140dB(0.00001%) and the TRINITY Preamp can follow. That is an improvement of a factor of 10 for a device, which was already on the Limit. That explains the advantage of an well designed analog volume control, it creates no THD and attenuates the noise level and the music Signal in the same way.
By the way, as you can see in the right picture we speak about noise levels in 10nV range if the volume control is set to -31dB!!!! That is the physical Limit of resistor noise.