Unlike many dacs available today, which boast impressive specs but are flawed with an analytical, cold and sterile (digital) sound, the Isabellina offers a natural and emotionally involving musical presentation that pulls the listener into the music and does not let go!
Inside the Isabellina reflects our philosophy in using carefully voiced premium parts, short signal paths, and going off-the-grid with battery power. On the outside you will enjoy simple yet elegant aesthetics and superb build quality. Every Isabellina is proudly hand-made in the USA and carefully tested, inspected, and packaged before making its journey to our highly-valued and satisfied customers.
Our recipe is a purist approach:
New-old-stock 16-bit, non-oversampling/non-upsampling D/A chip that implements R-2R conversion
No digital filtering
Proprietary, discrete Class A transistor output stage (no opamps)
SLA battery powered with dedicated linear voltage regulators for the analog and digital sections
Highest quality parts and short signal paths throughout
The Isabellina offers the listener three digital inputs that are selectable via a three-position, mini-toggle switch located above the digital input jacks:
USB that converts directly to I2S to feed the internal dac chip (no intermediate s/pdif conversion). This input offers optimal sound quality and requires the use of a computer (music server) with a USB port. The power bus from the computer is not used. We instead provide our own clean, on-board +5V line.
Coaxial (s/pdif) with a Vampire 75-ohm BNC input jack followed by a digital pulse isolation transformer that isolates noise and gives precision 75-ohm impedance matching.
Toslink (optical s/pdif) that naturally offers noise isolation and avoids ground loops from the source component via the optical transmission cable.
