Over the years, we have auditioned a vast range of digital cables, DAC or pre/pro and speakers. Either directly or through our clientele, we have become quite knowledgeable about the “front end” of the digital audio system. We therefore have selected a few components to sell alongside our Baetis computers as authorized dealers.
Putting it all together
From the start of your music and video chain to the very end, including the cables, we sell or build the best components you can get at any given price. We would be delighted to help find you a partial or complete multi-component system built around your Baetis computer. See blowfor some of the components we liked so much, we decided to sell them too.
Cables, listed in approximate order of price (most expensive to least):
Shunyata Research™
We are great fans of the Shunyata products – at all levels, they are at the top of what you can buy. Shunyata also makes some of the best AC conditioning equipment and we used their conditioning equipment for our digital equipment in our own listening rooms when we were based in Montana. The new Theta series offers incredible value – so much so that some of their more expensive lines had to be discontinued!
Revelation Audio Labs™
These cryo-treated silver cables have been used both inside and outside our best models. Our Prodigy and Revolution models have also used copper cables made by Revelation Audio Labs. Long lead times, but excellent products.
Silversmith Audio
For analog-realm, these beautifully-crafted cables are nothing short of incredible. Our own blind tests proved their speaker cables and interconnects to be better than anything we’d ever heard, at any price. It’s difficult to remain composed while praising these creations!
Analysis Plus
Digital and analog cables, we sell many of these for our all our models; with superior performance to many higher-priced offerings, these are truly great and not extravagantly priced. We have experience with their brands of digital and analog cables and we recommend this brand wholeheartedly for their price and excellent customer service.
DACs and other components
Regular visitors to our site will have noticed in the past that we are NOT fans of many DACs whose “main” input is the USB port. We also did not like USB outputs in general from computers. However, now we have developed USB outputs relying on industry-best partners’ offerings, we provide the stunning solutions for native DSD and high-resolution PCM. We changed our stance on USB once we heard it done right, and we ensure that it is integrated perfectly in our systems.
The T+A™ DAC 200 (US$7620, US$8220 with HDMI module)
T+A, which stands for Theory + Application, a German company that is extremely well known and loved in Europe and Asia, but is relatively unknown in the U.S. T+A’s Burr Brown DAC chip yields great sound through its AES input when playing PCM – rivalling DACs that cost several times more. Its USB input is spectacular, especially for native DSD. DSD is handled by a whole other DAC pathway in the DAC200, one that is superior to most other DACs, since it was pretty much handed down from their $30K+ products. If you are fortunate enough to have a few albums that are high sample rate DSD (up to DSD1024, which has a sample rate over 45 million Hz), the T+A will play those files at full resolution and do so as true native DSD, not the typical DoP (DSD over PCM) through its USB input. But fret not, even your PCM music can be elevated to new highs with HQPlayer software running on your Baetis (~$350 option) to upsample music to high resolution DSD, even on the fly while streaming Tidal and Qobuz. The results are spectacular with this DAC!
So, yes, we became one of the few T+A dealers in the U.S. and Canada, but we only sell their products to Baetis customer, so as to not take away business from local dealers.
Read John Mingo’s review of the T+A DAC 8 DSD . This DAC is now discontinued, succeeded by the DAC200, which is easily twice as god in every aspect!
Berkeley Audio Design DACs
Contact us for Alpha series and Reference series DACs by Berkeley. Our music servers were originally designed with these high-performing DACs in mind.
Saturn Audio Power Conditioners, Phono Stage, DAC, Pre-amp, Integrated Amp
We represent Saturn Audio products too. These are incredible bang for the buck, with a truly fantastic power conditioner lineup, a DAC that you can listen to forever that just sounds “right” and high performance, reasonably priced amps and phono stages. There are few bells and whistles, effectively none, but you know your money is going into the things that make the audio quality impressive. Just like the Baetis systems, there will be no flashy displays – just the good stuff that will give you goosebumps when you listen!
Speakers
As T+A dealers, we sell T+A speakers to our customers who also buy a Baetis system. We do also highly recommend Coherent Audio speakers, handmade in Ontario by Frank Fazzalari. Coherent and Baetis have won numerous awards at shows together, since these components compliment each other like coffee… and more coffee.