Burson Conductor USB DAC and Headphone Amplifier

An uncompromising 3 in 1.

When Burson introduced the HA-160D in 2010, it was met with initial skepticism. Many questioned the  approach of combining three main functions; DAC, Preamp and Headphone amp into a small and elegant enclosure. Many were certain that something had to give and one if not all of those functions must be secondary and hence compromised.

The chief editor of 6moons was the first to realise that such worries were unfounded and in fact, each of those three functions were world class and competitive with the single function machines in their individual categories, which were much larger in size and more expensive in price. Furthermore, without the need to cable or equipment match three separate components, the HA-160D put music enjoyment back squarely into focus. It was initially honored with a Blue Moon award with many other recognitions to follow. More importantly it was embraced by audiophiles as a benchmark performer of the time.

We have now pushed our uncompromising 3 in 1 concept to a whole new level. And we have named it The Conductor.

The DAC

At the heart of the Burson Conductor DAC is the ESS SABRE32 Reference DAC chip. With patented 32-bit Hyper-stream DAC architecture and Time Domain Jitter Eliminator technology, the SABRE32 is one of the best and most expensive DAC chips in the world and is truly reference class .

While Burson are not the first, nor the only, company to use the impressive SABRE32, they are unique in refusing to use IC based building blocks anywhere in our circuitry. Instead, they aimed to unleash the full potential of this chip through the development of tailor designed circuitry. They did not even use our own award-winning discrete circuitry featured in the HA-160D. No, that circuitry was designed and optimised for another DAC chip. Burson then started from scratch and developed a new circuit that is specifically based on the SABRE32. The result is a true representation of what it can do when pushed by team Burson.

The Headphone Amplifier

The Conductor also features the well regarded Soloist Headphone Amplifier. It had to deploy another 35W customised transformer to ensure that the Soloist circuitry is independent and optimised at all times. This is to ensure that its performance is exactly the same as the standalone Soloist.

The high performance preamp

The Conductor is not your average headphone amp with an added preamp function. Burson did not simply solder a piece of wire from the headphone output jack to create an unrefined preamp.  Instead the preamp output has been extracted from the voltage gain stage before the current gain section, to create a preamp that reflects the full potential of our FET output stage, and our less is more philosophy. Coupled with the VOS, both performance and versatility are uncompromising.

Connectivity

On the digital front, the Conductor features a 24bit/192khz Tenor TE8802 USB receiver working in Asynchronous Transfer Mode. It also accepts coaxial and Toslink inputs supporting 32bit/192khz audio files. On the analogue front, it accepts analogue input via RCA and outputs in 6.35mm headphone jack, line-level output (DAC) and variable output (preamp). With such versatility, the new conductor works perfectly with any audio system.