Digital Network Preamplifier or DNP for short is the name of Audionet’s youngest offspring, that fine high-end electronics manufacture from Bochum. And design-wise it appears to be a trend-setter, possibly not only for Audionet. The device category ‘amplifiers with integrated D/A converter and streamer’ has been around for quite some time and enjoys a growing popularity. Indeed, it offers unmissable benefits on the technical side and on the other hand an easier operation than a stack of separate components. In most cases the makers will therefore plant the digital parts as a module into a remote-controllable amplifier. Well, the Bochumers don’t take such an easy way out here, which is a good thing.

If you peek through the venting slots in the sturdy bonnet or, like the reviewer, dare to unscrew the massive piece to dive into the labyrinth of circuits, even the expert will be amazed by how much incredible effort went into the production of this manufacturing masterpiece. Several large circuit boards with the dominating and impressive power supply are fitted with dozens of small to tiny little slave boards. And if, like the reviewers, you ever had the rare honour of talking with chief designer Volker Wischniowski directly at his workplace in the R&D department, you will know how much brainpower goes into every detail. One can listen to the graduate engineer for hours on end and thereby learn more about analogue and digital technology than in a whole semester at the university, while he keeps picking one board after the other out of the sample unit, or he fishes parts from the spare box, and besides the sober technical details and the fascinatingly described sound properties he can even tell a little anecdote about every piece.

Hardly replicable in the finished amplifier, but only visible in the partly disassembled sample are the developing efforts which were particularly tricky to realise on the DNP, i.e. to keep the signal paths – no matter if analogue, digital or mixed – as short as possible and thus minimise the mutual interference between the different assembly groups. The square of the circle had to be solved here, because either the components sit close to each other and influence each other on short paths or vice versa. Furthermore, this should apply to analogue and at the same time to digital signal components in the device as well.

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