Many folks agree that the DVA Digital Preamplifier DAC is something special.¹ Clients who have them love them. Last year, The Sound Advocate proclaimed, "The Van Alstine DVA Digital Preamp is unquestionably recommended!" And most recently, Part Time Audio included it in one of their "best of 2025" lists, stating, "My entire system sounded faster, cleaner and more powerful with the Van Alstine DVA Digital Preamplifier."

We've kind of grown used to this kind of praise. :-)

There are myriad details that make the DVA Digital Preamplifier what it is, including the high-performance discrete gain circuits that we covered previously, the carefully balanced reconstruction filter design, and the use of low impedance active voltage references for the DAC IC. This post is about another subtle yet important detail: How the DVA Digital Preamplifier resolves a dilemma regarding support for both XLR differential and RCA single-ended outputs.

A discrete audio opamp I designed a while back and that's used in AVA products to this day will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year. So, I thought the time was right to say some things about it and discrete audio in general.

If you peruse the things that Frank Van Alstine said in the previous century, one of the gems you might find is his view that audio gear shouldn't re-interpret an artist's intent. Rather, it should function as a perfect copy machine. Others have referred to this philosophy as "straight wire with gain."

I believe Frank needed to emphasize this at the time largely because of the increasing fashionability of single-ended class A tube power amps -- which as a rule came with with low linearity and high output impedance. The occasionally pleasant effect this combination can create became a marketing lever for many manufacturers. "Warm. Rich." Buzzwords for a loose low end and signal masking. What they never said was, "Not as the artist intended." Nor, "Works great for some stuff, not so much on others."

TL;DR: It's not important.

For many people, summer is a time to relax and take it easy. Not so for us! A lot has been happening here. Most notably, for only the second time in its existence, AVA has moved. It's only a couple miles, but as anyone who has moved house knows, distance barely figures into how much work it is.

We're really looking forward to serving everyone better than ever before once we're done setting up the new space. But we're still working out the kinks. (Thank-you internet service provider for having so much difficulty moving our phone number to the new location.) Your patience is eternally appreciated while we finish things up -- and especially until we have phone service that doesn't divert everyone into voice mail.

In other news, we've been busy with exciting new R&D projects and will report anything solid as soon as it's solid. It's taken forever, but things have finally gotten back to normal with most suppliers since the COVID-19 Great Parts Apocalypse™. It's a tremendous relief that we can finally think about new products again.

And of course we've been crazy busy building you the great gear that you love. We're all looking forward to doing much more of that!

Welcome to this inaugural installment of From Mithat's Desk at Audio by Van Alstine.

My name is Mithat Konar, and I design products for Audio by Van Alstine. In this space, I plan to post about audio stuff as it relates to AVA. Things that I'd like you to know. Things I might be excited about. And, occasionally, things that might be a cause for concern.

Stay tuned. There's more to come.

Please ignore this post. It's just here so we can test some things.