The Grace m905 is what in hi-fi speak is a pre-amplifier, and in this case one with a DAC built in as well. For the studio it becomes the centre piece of your audio path, allowing all sources to be passed through a single digital to analogue converter which makes for the best comparison listening.
I actually purchased the Grace for my home studio after careful consideration and comparison with other like products from Crane Song with their excellent Avocet and Dangerous Music’s Monitor ST. The Grace however ticked more boxes for my needs and the gorgeous remote was the final nail in the coffin for other products.
My home studio is also my main stereo listening system, I do all of my critical listening in this studio so the DAC function had to be good and from all I had read about Grace, their philosophy and reputation, I felt sure that the product would live up to my expectations.
Now I have had many high-end consumer audio DACs in my home setup over the years, some costing nearly twice as much as the Grace, and none of them featured all that the Grace can do as they were dedicated DACs, so I was not expecting the Grace to be better than those higher end models, just close enough, but was I wrong!
If you want to understand all the Grace can do for your studio read their product description as that is not what we do as repetition is pointless, but I will say this: The Grace m905 is easily the most transparent DAC I have ever heard and offers outstanding three dimensional sound staging far and above any of the high-end DACs I have had in my system and they were no slouches either.
All the cliches apply here, as I start to go through all of my favourite tracks and discovering new details I had not previously heard, particularly in the bottom end which is now so open and dynamic. It proves once and for all that no matter how many companies use the same Burr Brown PCM 1796 DAC chip, it doesn’t mean they all sound the same. The analogue output stage at the end determines the ultimate quality of the output and Grace have clearly designed a superb analogue output stage.
With it’s fully balanced architecture and quality build, the Grace m905 deserves a place in any respectable studio environment. I have no doubt the Crane Song Avocet and Dangerous Monitor ST are excellent controllers as well, but neither of them offer the full set of functions the Grace does, and neither is as well implemented in my view.
The Grace also proves one other thing, that the pro-audio world offers far better products for far less than the consumer world does. If you can live without an infrared remote control, buy the Grace m905 and put it into you home stereo system, it will outperform anything else you could buy at anywhere near this price and then some. It also ticks all of the boxes for audiophile consumers: Asynchronous USB, 24bit/192kHz and DSD playback. Spectacular and very highly recommended.
