Bryston BDA-3 DAC Preview

See the complete review of the Bryston BDA-3 DAC

Bryston brings to us a recent update to their line of digital components, the BDA-3 external DAC. “What, another DAC” you say.

True, we appear to have been tripping over them lately with all the scads of DACs that seem to have been released by every brand under the sun. So, what distinguishes the BDA-3 from the rest of the pack? Well, first it has a total of 10 separate digital inputs. Not bad, sounds pretty flexible, right? Next, the BDA-3 is one of a handful of standalone DACs that has HDMI inputs. Not just one, mind you, but four! Is your curiosity piqued yet? No, not quite? Did I happen to mention that those HDMI inputs can accept and decode a native DSD bitstream, from a suitable player, without converting it to PCM first? Do I have your undivided attention now? Excellent!

The BDA-3 is very much in keeping with Bryston’s traditional design ethos: Clean functional design, robust build quality and borderline laboratory grade performance. The unit features a pair of flagship AKM4490 DAC chips arranged in a balanced, dual-mono configuration. Any input signal (PCM) that is fed to the DACs will have had its clocking information stripped and subsequently re-synchronized to the Bryston’s internal master clock. The resultant decoding is finally fed through Bryston’s traditionally excellent fully discrete class-A balanced output stage.

Besides the showcased multiple HDMI inputs, the BDA-3 also features two asynchronous USB inputs (I’ve never seen more than one on a DAC) which can handle the widest range of bit depths and sampling rates from among the other inputs (up to 32 bit/384 PCM and DSD-256). Toslink, SPDIF, BNC and AES/EBU connections round off the rest of the inputs while a pair of balanced and unbalanced connections cover the output choices.

The BDA-3 is strictly a fixed-level device so a pre-amp stage will be necessary to control volume.

Brief, preliminary listening with the BDA-3 in my system shows it to be typical of the Bryston family line. Clean, resolving and very neutral.

MSRP for the Bryston BDA-3 DAC is $3495.00 and expect a complete review, with measurements, on our website in the near future.

See the complete review of the Bryston BDA-3 DAC

Carlo Lo Raso

A native of Toronto Canada, Carlo's interest in audio began at a young age when, unbeknownst to his mother, he started taking apart her numerous transistor radios to see how they worked. This desire for “knowledge through deconstruction” continued through to the family’s 8-track tape player, turntable, headphones, and speakers. Carlo subsequently spent a lot of time in his room. Toronto was a fertile ground for Hi-Fi in the 1970s and 80s and Carlo spent much of his wayward youth hanging out in downtown Toronto stereo shops, listening to all manner of gear and picking the brains of the various store owners. Through that formative experience, Carlo developed an appreciation for good music and good sound reproduction. Also, as a budding graphic artist, the aesthetic aspects of a given piece of gear became increasingly of interest to his eyes. It was at about that time as well that Carlo began purchasing “Audio Magazine” on a regular basis and came to appreciate, in particular, the writing and reviewing of the late Leonard Feldman. Later on, he was also influenced by the writing and observations of the staff at Sound and Vision Canada, helmed at the time by Alan Loft. Carlo graduated from Sheridan College with a degree in Classical Animation and was subsequently employed by Walt Disney Consumer Products for 10 years as a Character Artist and Art Director. Having become disenchanted with Los Angeles, he then decided to strike out on his own. Carlo started his own company and has been freelancing artwork, from his home studio, primarily for the toy and publishing industries since 2001. In 2013, on a bit of a lark, Carlo answered a “Call for Writers” ad from an AV website that he had been regularly reading for about 5 years called Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. He had come to appreciate the website’s combination of subjective impressions along with the objective bench-testing available in several of the reviews. The “B-Team” must have been working that day because by some miracle he was hired as a writer and his first review for the site was published early in 2014. Carlo has been continually writing, editing, traveling, listening, and learning on the company’s behalf ever since. Carlo currently lives in Granville, Ohio with his wife, two sons, and a very old, but chill dachshund.