LampizatOr BALTIC 5 DAC

Description

LampizatOr BALTIC 5 DAC

We put everything that we could from that legendary design of an old Baltic 4 into Baltic-5

ENGINE 12 – November 2025

In November 20 – 2025 the Engine 11 becomes 12. The update in technology available to us made possible enough changes, that it is worthy of a new naming number

ENGINE TWELVE

Whats new:

1. The same character, style and flavor of sound – the change is really mostly technical

2. The listening pleasure increases – the sound has better liquidity, clarity, transparency, it is more musical, bass is more nuanced and deeper, more controlled. The difference is similar to changing the tubes to the best we can find, and at the same time changing cables to the best we can find. The two differences combined is comparable to what we have done to the engine 11 to make it 12.

3. We changed the conversion chip to a newer and better one

4. While changing the engine, we redesigned the PCB with a new mister wizzard designer who added his experience and improved filtering, regulation, grounding, routing and isolation.

5. The new circuit allows to designate the chip as monophonic so we were able to make a new DUAL LAYER sandwich engine – exactly dual mono, fully balanced and fully channel-separated. The quality increase is worthy of making it a new separate variant. Engine12x2 (times two means dual PCB, dual mono). Everything is doubled (dual).

6. We are able to do automatic frequency recognition and hence we can do i2S with full signal recognition. This in turns allows us to use HDMI i2S input wih proper muting and everything. This becomes the part of E12 package (and 12×2 as well).

Our E12 and E12x2 iare size identical to E11, with identical mounting positions, screws and everything. So we can offer this as a package upgrade (retrofittable)  in place of E11.

Every DAC we ever made can be upgraded to E12. With reservetion of limited space – most of the DACS we made are possible to upgrade to E12x2 as well

You get tons of very cool features here, at a price that is almost too good to be true: phenomenal digital engine 12  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.

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 2025 engine 12 also with DSD512 on board as standard.
• True Copper output capacitors.
• Volume control as an option.
• 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.

Standard front panel is : Powdercoat Structural Matt Black, also available Sahara Silver, Anodized Black, Anodizes Alu Silver
Top chassis: black, and at extra cost real copper.

Volume controlled model has a display, remote, auxiliary analog inputs – SE and XLR for other sources like turntables, tuners, reel-to-reel etc

Balanced Tube DAC

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.

Baltic 4 VS Baltic 5 – 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 12 , but also power supply is changed for the benefit of Engine 12  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 5 is knocking on the door of 15 and 20 thousand dollar DACs.

Lampizator BALTIC 4 Leaflet
Lampizator BALTIC 4 Datasheet
Lampizator BALTIC 4 User’s Manual