dCS

Lina Network DAC

£12,500

Lina is the new starting point in dCS‘s range, a compact yet powerful and beautiful-sounding high resolution streaming system. Lina streaming Network DAC is the heart of the Lina system, delivering extraordinary sound from any digital source. Featuring the renowned dCS Ring DAC and Digital Processing Platform.

It’s compatible with all digital audio formats and supports hi-res streaming from Roon, TIDAL, Qobuz, Spotify, Deezer, AirPlay & more.

dCS Lina Network DAC

The Lina Network DAC is both a continuation and a new beginning. Its design combines renowned dCS technologies with new innovations developed for headphone listeners – resulting in a bold new interpretation of the dCS experience, and a complete reimagining of form and function.

With the Lina Network Streaming DAC, dCS have taken their core playback technologies, including the dCS Ring DAC™ and Digital Processing Platform, and added new innovations developed for headphone listeners. These include their first ever touch-screen display, a streamlined user interface for easier navigation, and a powerful flex-rigid circuit board, which allows them to deliver all of the features you’d expect from a dCS DAC in a much smaller chassis.

The result is a powerful, supremely capable product designed for use in a wide range of environments, from living rooms to studios and workspaces. With its wide dynamic range, crisp, clear playback, expansive soundstage, and tonal neutrality, it provides a deeply natural, highly detailed, and profoundly musical sound that encapsulates our singular approach to audio.

Add unique headphone optimisation technology, an elegant and tactile design, and a high-performance streaming platform, and you have a hugely versatile source that delivers spectacular sound, however you choose to listen. Designed to inspire, inform and entertain, it will give you a whole new perspective on the artists and recordings you love.

Effortless listening
While the Lina Network DAC offers a vast range of features, it is designed with simplicity, convenience and ease of use in mind. Its streamlined user interface allows you to easily navigate system settings, select music and manage your playback experience, while the dCS Mosaic app offers an intuitive and painless way to browse and access music from multiple sources and audio libraries. With a choice of inputs and outputs, user selectable filters, it allows you to seamlessly enjoy audio from any source, in any format, without compromise.

Scrupulous design
Crafted from billet Aluminium (a material selected for its excellent acoustic properties), the Lina Network DAC has been meticulously designed to deliver the finest possible sound, with the lowest possible levels of distortion and noise. Each aspect of its design – from its billet Aluminium casework, to its internal fixings and components, and proprietary hardware and software – is carefully engineered and exhaustively tested to ensure it provides the best possible experience, and the highest levels of quality and reliability. This holistic approach and obsessive attention to detail is one of the reasons that dCS DACs sound so sublime.

Unlimited potential
The Lina Network DAC’s performance is driven by a completely flexible control board – the dCS Digital Processing Platform. This powerful, robust and highly intelligent system operates on code written by dCS engineers, and it can be endlessly updated to deliver any number of new features and enhancements. This means we are able to continue upgrading Lina’s performance over time, and ensure that each system delivers a state of the art experience long after it’s purchased.

Incredible sound
At the heart of all dCS DACs is the Ring DAC™: a proprietary digital-to-analogue conversation system renowned for its ultra-wide bandwidth, technical accuracy, and ability to reveal astonishing levels of detail in digital recordings – from the subtlest of sounds, to the sense of time and harmonic movement, and the atmosphere that surrounds a musical performance. This unique component is an integral part of our systems, and remains unrivalled in its sonic and technical abilities.

Extraordinary technology
At the heart of Lina’s design is a powerful flex-rigid circuit board housing over 2,000 individual components. Designed by dCS engineers, this extraordinary piece of technology allows us to combine all of Lina’s core functions and features on to a single circuit. This not only saves space, it also allows us to deliver an incredibly clean signal path, which is essential for great audio.

Enhanced optimisation
Available to all Lina Network DAC owners, dCS Expanse is a unique headphone processing platform which offers an enhanced version of crossfeed optimisation. With its unique multi-stage processing method, Expanse optimises audio while preserving the reverberation in a recording (something that is crucial to helping us localise sounds, and establish a sense of space and depth.) Accessed via two optional settings, it can provide a heightened sense of realism when listening to a wide range of stereo recordings.

Key Features

• dCS Ring DAC™ system and Digital Processing Platform ensure audio is reproduced with absolute integrity, for a highly detailed, musical and deeply natural sound

• dCS Mosaic platform supports hi-res streaming via Roon, Spotify, Deezer, Qobuz, TIDAL, Internet Radio and Apple AirPlay

• Patented dCS Expanse technology offers enhanced headphone optimisation, for a more natural and immersive experience when listening to a wide range of stereo recordings

• Touch screen UI with customisable menu allows listeners to easily control playback and adjust system settings

• Flexible firmware provides unlimited scope for future upgrades, with new features and enhancements delivered via simple software updates

• All-new electronic and mechanical design delivers a vast range of features in a compact and elegant format, while digital volume control function removes need for separate pre-amp

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Specifications

Product Dimensions / Weight
121.5mm (H) x 220mm (W) x 339mm (D) 7.4kg

Upsampling
• 1 stereo balanced pair on 2x 3-pin male XLR connectors (pin 2 = hot, pin 3 = cold). These outputs are electronically balanced and floating, the signal balance ratio at 1 kHz is better than 40dB. Output impedance is 3Ω , maximum load is 600Ω (a 10kΩ – 100kΩ load is recommended)
• 1 stereo unbalanced pair on 2x RCA Phono connectors. Output impedance is 52Ω, maximum load is 600Ω (a 10kΩ – 100kΩ load is recommended)
• Output levels are 0.2V, 0.6V, 2V, or 6V rms for a full-scale input, set in the menu.

L-R Crosstalk
Better than –115dB0, 20Hz-20kHz

Streaming Compatibility
Supports the following platforms and services:
• UPnP
• Qobuz
• Deezer
• Tidal
• Internet Radio
• Spotify
• Apple AirPlay 2 (support at 44.1 or 48kS/s)
• RoonReady

Upsampling
Multi-stage DXD oversampling with switchable DSD Upsampling (1-bit 2.822 or 3.07MS/s) and DSDx2 Upsampling (1-bit 5.644 or 6.14MS/s).

Digital Inputs
• 2 x AES/EBU on 3 pin XLR 44.1-384kS/s
• 1 x S/PDIF BNC Coax 44.1-192kS/s
• 1 x S/PDIF on RCA 44.1-192kS/s
• 1 x Toslink 44.1-96kS/s
• 1 x USB Type B 44.1-384kS/s, PCM and DSD, DSDx2 in Async Mode
• 1 x USB Type A connector for mass storage devices (navigated using Mosaic)

Frequency Response (set to filter 1)
• Fs = 44.1 or 48kS/s +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz
• Fs = 88.2 or 96kS/s +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz -3dB @ >38kHz
• Fs = 176.4 or 192kS/s +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz -3dB @ >67kHz
• Fs = 352.8 or 384kS/s +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz -3dB @ >100kHz
• DSD64 +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz -3dB @ >90kHz
• DSD128 +/-0.1dB, 10Hz-20kHz -3dB @ >100kHz

Residual Noise (6v output setting)
• 16-bit data: Better than –96dB0, 20Hz-20kHz unweighted
• 24-bit data: Better than –113dB0, 20Hz-20kHz unweighted

Sample frequencies and formats
Supports the following audio formats
and sample rates:
• 44.1-384kS/s up to 24 bits
• DSD/64, DSD/128
• Native DSD + DoP (input dependent)
• FLAC, WAV, AIFF, MQA

Power Requirements
90-127V / 220-240V, 50/60Hz
Power consumption: 30W