Like several of the newer DACs on the market, the Bryston BDA-1 includes a USB socket for connection to a desktop or laptop computer, potentially turning a cheap bit of consumer electronics into a high-end server.

The USB socket is one of eight inputs, catering for all the usual flavours of interconnection except 192kHz sampling rate via dual AES sockets, something we admittedly can't recall seeing in a single domestic installation. And anyway, you can send such ultra-high sampling rates to the BDA-1 down a single cable.

On a piece of upmarket kit like this it's no surprise to find both unbalanced and balanced analogue outputs, but the digital output is a nice bonus, handy if, for instance, you run some sort of digital recorder or a digitally-fed slave system elsewhere in the house.

Upsampling skills

Like many DACs, the Bryston BDA-1 features upsampling of digital sources running at 96kHz or lower sampling rate and it's also possible to switch the upsampling off – of course the second stage of upsampling, within the DAC chips, is still active, but basically the upsampling option is an alternative digital filter.

Those DAC chips, by the way, are a pair of Cirrus CS4398s, as used in all sorts of DACs and CD players, some costing a good deal less than the BDA-1.

This may look like a bit of a cheek at first, but we entirely sympathise with Bryston's decision to use them: as with FM tuners, mass-market integrated circuits do such a good job that exceeding their performance would be a vastly complex and expensive operation.

DCS is a case in point here, its fabulous proprietary DACs starting at around four times the price of the BDA-1.

Top quality build

Instead, Bryston has concentrated on what comes before and after the DAC itself, which means the digital reclocking circuitry and the analogue output.

The former is a double-stage arrangement which is claimed to reduce jitter while locking rapidly to incoming digital streams even when their rate is on the border of what's acceptable, while the latter uses Bryston's own 'discrete Class A op-amp' circuits which have exceptionally low distortion, high slew rate and good cable-driving ability.

Along with the rest of the circuitry, they are assembled using surface-mounted components on the single audio circuit board, which runs the full width of the case, but uses less than half the depth – there's quite a lot a fresh air inside.

Power is taken from a pair of small encapsulated transformers followed by plenty of filtering and regulation. Build quality, as usual for Bryston, is beyond reproach and the sockets in particular are of commendably high quality.

Polished sound

One tends to approach a piece of kit like this with quite high expectations and we were encouraged to find them almost immediately fulfilled.

Having connected up the BDA-1 to the first CD player that came to hand – nothing fancy – we used it first to listen through some newly arrived recordings that had come in for quality monitoring purposes for a record label. That meant that the recordings themselves were unfamiliar, so a highly positive overall reaction boded well for them as well as the Bryston BDA-1.

In fact, we were really most impressed, not only with the general degree of tonal purity and detail exhibited, but also with the unusual degree of what, for want of a better word, we'll call 'polish' on the sound.