Hot footed it over to User211, Justin this afternoon with the just received Pi-Dac.

Was great to be presented with an Apogee based system. Our musical tastes are similar which helped as well.

Found it very fascinating to watch the way the panels vibrate both LF and HF ribbon in response to the music. Think the bass panel must be equivalent in size three 18" woofers. Then there is the scale of the presentation, so much detail and with such intensity. Justin applied a high pass filter through the playback software but in my view this cut off a fair amount of detail. The source was a laptop via USB to the Lampizator Level 7, a brand I had not come across before. A substantial DAC with valve stages. And Justin demonstrated how the character could be changed following a valve change.

The valve power amps are obviously very capable to cope with the power hungry Apogee drivers. It was a high class sound that I could happily live with.

Onto the Pi DAC competing with the Lampizator. Boy was it playing up again with the IP addresses etc. With two IT power users we could not get it to play across the network. Then went for plan B to try some music files on a USB stick. Success, we managed to play one. Then tried to add another to the play list and couldn't manage it. Yes the Lampizator came out on top but I think Justin was surprised at the quality of output on offer from the Pi DAC. Need to get some more hours on it now and think about power supply options.

An enjoyable afternoon.

Regards

Stephen