Lampizator Baltic 4 DAC

We put everything that we could from that legendary design of an old Level4 into Baltic-4.

You get tons of very cool features here, at a price that is almost too good to be true:  phenomenal digital engine ELEVEN, triode output stage, DC coupling of all stages, double thickness front panel, new engraved rear end, tube based, choke filtered power supply with directly heated dual diode - 5C3S or 5U4G or 274B or GZ37 or 5W4R.  Add Copper Caps, balanced circuit - all in one neat package.

The Baltic project is our attempt on the pinnacle design made with octal tubes. The whole octal tube kingdom is the biggest one, with tens of tube models and thousands of brand / version variations. These tubes today can cost as little as 2 Euro or as much as 500.

Our highest level DACs, in order to surpass the quality of noval tubes by a small margin, had to come from DHT kingdom, but Baltic, a result of our 13 years efforts and experiments and prototyping - push the octal design to the limits. It makes the Baltic-4 our newest model with octal tubes. One could argue that the Baltic-4 is in fact the turbocharged Amber 4 on steroids, but there is more than meets the eye.

Volume controlled is not available in this DAC - please look into Amber or Atlantic for volume control.

In our endless efforts to research and design DACs, we arrived at this design. Combining everything we know about DAC designing, at an unbeatable value. Our goal was to get as close as we can to the Golden Gate sound, but at roughly 1/3 budget.

The resulting DAC positions itself with technology and sound between the Amber4 and the Golden Gate 2. This DAC is a big leap in sound quality over the old Baltic 1.

We are very proud of this DAC, being worthy of our 10th anniversary in this industry and showing the best LampizatOr qualities at a slightly more affordable price point.

MAIN HIGHLIGHTS

• Every unit is SE and Balanced at the same time, no need to configure the unit as balanced

• True balanced topology with four  channels - one per each phase of stereo sound.

• Our newest 2022 engine 11 also with DSD512 on board as standard

• True Copper output capacitors

• 4 digital inputs: USB, SPDIF, TOSLINK and AES/EBU in every DAC

• New tube topology that redefines what is possible with tubes in the DAC

• Fully tubed, directly heated dual diode rectified, CLC filtered anode power supply

Baltic 4 VS Baltic 3 - What's new ?

Visually - from the outside, the biggest change is in the volume control / preamp variant. It  has a new resistor ladder, resistor-switching microprocessor, software and display from the Pacific DAC. Especially the OLED display with 10x bigger window looks great and the volume control also sounds great due to our new impedance scheme and matching

Another big change is in the analog section where big and bold 12BH7 dual triode replaced ECC82 as output driver. In every test the 12BH7 consistently gives a more interesting performance

In digital section   - not only the whole circuit is replaced by our fabulous Engine Eleven, but also power supply is changed for the benefit of Engine Eleven's pure sound

Function-wise we got one more input - and that in turn allows us to offer 4 inputs - namely USB, AES/EBU, S/PDIF and TOSLINK - all one ever needs without need of customer choosing 3 out of 4. Consequently, since we give all inputs already, this selection has been removed from the website DAC configurator

Smaller internal changes are  among others: better grounding, better noise suppression, better voltage regulation, better operating points of tubes, better volume matching, better muting circuits and colder devices throughout.  The sound quality of Baltic 4 is knocking on the door of 15 and 20 thousand dollar DACs.

Specifications