What a long strange trip it’s been. When I first embarked on my digital audio journey I opted for DACs with all the bells and whistles, all the features and every possible hardware connection. And over what has been easily more than a dozen DACs each from different manufacturers, I realised that finding the sound with which I could be happy should be my primary concern and then everything would fall into place.
My present SW1X gear as pictured: SW1X DAC II and SW1X LPU 1. If someone had told me that some 10 years later my everyday DAC would connect to my digital source via an RCA Coaxial cable and play files at a maximum of 24-bit/96 kHz resolution, I would have laughed at them mercilessly. Still, now I have to admit, I’ve never been happier listening to music from my digital library, so much so that I doubled down and got the LPU I phone stage to cover all my bases.
I decided to go with SW1X because once I heard them at someone’s in London, England, I knew I had to know more so I travelled out to SW1X HQ and interviewed its founder/designer Slaw Roschkow. That interview has been posted in the group several times. Having visited Slawa and learning more about his design philosophy and dedication to making gear that delivers the utmost in playback and sound reproduction, I was sold right then and there.
