Ithaka

The Ithaka Minor represents the distilled essence of Aries Cerat's most ambitious digital engineering, crafted to bring the scale and authority of their reference systems into a more accessible footprint. It stands as a purist non-oversampling ladder DAC that completely eschews the common delta-sigma architecture, opting instead for a passive conversion process that treats the digital signal with absolute respect. At the heart of this machine lies an array of twenty-four top-grade Analogue Devices AD1865 R2R converters, arranged in a parallel single-ended configuration to ensure vanishingly low noise and exceptional linearity. By running these converters without any digital filters or oversampling, the Ithaka Minor preserves the temporal integrity and harmonic richness of the source material exactly as it was recorded. Beyond the digital engine, the Ithaka Minor features the proprietary Gen1 TriodeFet output stage. This circuit provides the high-current drive and low output impedance of a pure Class A amplifier, ensuring that the DAC can communicate with any preamplifier or power stage with effortless dynamic authority. The result is a sound that feels remarkably tactile, with a level of tonal saturation and emotional depth rarely found in digital sources.