Professional Experience

dCS was started in 1987 by a group of electronic engineers with expertise in the design of analogue to digital converters (ADCs) and digital to analogue converters (DACs). We were originally involved in developing applications and providing consultancy and design services to government agencies and major corporations involved in military avionics and satellite communications.

In the early 90's the company passion for recorded music saw dCS move away from military avionics to concentrate its efforts on the recording and playback of music in the developing digital recording industry.

Using the knowledge and applications developed for avionics we began to focus on producing state-of-the-art studio ADCs, which rapidly became the industry standard with classical recording and mastering engineers, where transparency and fidelity to the original signal are of the essence.

Throughout the early 1990's dCS became recognised in the recording and mastering industries as a producer of the finest ADC and DAC units available. As well as the usual requirement for signal conversion between the analogue and digital domains, studio engineers often needed to cross convert between different digital formats such as downsampling a 20-bit, 48 kHz mastertape to 16 bit, 44.1 kHz for CD authoring.

These requirements and our expertise in signal conversion led to a number of dCS world firsts including;

• World's first 24 bit Audio A/D converter
• World's first 24/96 A/D converter
• World's first 24/192 A/D and D/A
• World's first 24/192 D/D converter
• World's first commercial PCM to DSD Format Converter
• World's first PCM to DSD Format Converter with USB input