Review: Paul Miller

Those wizards of trickledown tech are at it again: DS Audio’s new entry-level model, the DS-E3, gives you a taste of the Masters series at less than a tenth of the price!

It’s hard to name a cartridge brand as prolific as DS Audio. It seems every time you turn around there’s a new model. Following a flurry of entries at the extreme top-end, including the Grand Master EX [HFN Oct ’23], DS Audio has returned with a new optical cartridge at entry level, an absolute cracker called the DS-E3 – and with no price increase over the DS-E1 [HFN May ’19] it replaces.

Filters, particularly AC mains filters and regenerators, have long been an audiophile staple but the genre has expanded in recent years to accommodate our embrace of digital and streaming audio in particular. With 'high speed' digital transmission comes the prospect of a sea of extraneous noise and interference, from both outside and inside the 'system loop', that washes though our equipment. Jitter in the digital domain and RF-related IM and other distortions are the least of what we understand as the audible consequences of this entirely unwanted hash.

As we described in our review of AudioQuest's original JitterBug [HFN Oct '15], this little serial plug-in is not a re-clocker for digital datastreams, but rather a purely passive device (drawing no power from the USB hub) that provides transformer-isolation and RF filtering of both the 5V USB 'VBUS' and its differential data lines. The promise, according to AQ, goes something like this: 'the dual-discrete noise-dissipation circuits reduce internally generated RF noise for improved streaming audio, [reducing] jitter and packet errors'.