With the MPS-8, the authentic early digital sound remained intact. But because the music sounded like it had this laid-back ease to it, my ears were directed straight to the musical flow, which meant that any tonal shortcomings in the recordings were not obtrusively noticeable. I have to admit I’d never experienced this in such a way before, not even with analog playback. As Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht both said, it’s the simple things that are hard to do. It follows then that the effortlessness of the MPS-8’s music reproduction is fueled by a technical masterpiece and all manner of innovative digital inventions. Contrary to the mainstream doctrine, it isn’t discrete components that carry out the conversion work but special ICs. Andreas Koch has programmed the algorithms of these FPGAs so they increase the sampling rate to many times the standard DSD rate. This is the only way to implement sophisticated digital filters, known as “adaptive apodizing filters,” that are responsible for the naturalness of the sound. The nice thing about this is the absence of trying to achieve any supposed “higher, faster, farther” ideals in terms of resolution, and the technical know-how serves the listener’s ability to enjoy the reproduction and that alone.
