The dCS Lina DAC

This one is way overdue… I’ve had the Lina from dCS for a long time. Long enough that I bought the review sample, yet it’s been a lot of exploration and comparisons.

If you are into premium headphone amplifiers, you’ve no doubt heard of the Lina by now. It’s a three piece, modular setup to be used as a headphone amplifier, with it’s own DAC and word clock. You can purchase the stack for $31,150 or the individual components. The Amp is $9,750, the DAC $13,650 and the Master Clock $7,750.

As strictly a headphone amplifier, with its own dedicated DAC, this is probably a bit on the spendy side, but when you consider what a Warwick Aperio system costs ($40,000) and good as it is, you can only use it with their headphones, the dCS doesn’t stack up so badly after all. And this is nowhere near close to what the big Sennheiser system is – nearly $100k these days.

The sound is pure dCS, neutral, dynamic and resolving.

The headphone amplifier will drive anything you’ve got to plug in, and is on par if not more revealing than a handful of other premium headphone amplifiers we’ve tried. The DAC and clock remind me a lot sonically of what was going on with my past Bartok, though the clock takes things to another level.

It also is capable of playing every streaming source possible (including MQA), with a plethora of digital inputs as well as an Ethernet input so it can be a streamer as well.

The big choices are would you like yours modular or all at once, or do you prefer black or silver?

When the Lina first arrived, it was only available with fixed outputs, but now that has changed to allow the Lina stack to have a variable output, so it can drive a power amplifier directly. And thanks to a single analog input, you can plug a phono stage in. This is the true value proposition here. We’ve used the Lina now with a number of great power amplifiers, tube and solid-state with excellent result.

So while nearly thirty two thousand dollars is a lot for a three box headphone player, it is not insane money for a premium DAC/Streamer, headphone amplifier and linestage. Especially if you purchase the headphone amp and DAC first, adding the clock later. But once you hear the Lina clock, you are going to want it, because the level of coherence it adds to the presentation can’t be ignored.

Please click here to go to the dCS site for all the fine tech bits. We’ll have a full review explaining everything in depth very soon.