I was gobsmacked by the transparency of the dCS Vivaldi when I first heard it in 2013. I've heard lots of dCS, but over time they leave me with a feeling of disengagement. I don't get excited by chip-based DACs. I have the internal Gryphon Diablo 300 DAC and used it for the last 6 months before getting the Aqua Formula. It's got an ESS3016 chip and is perfectly OK, but had me spinning records most of the time. I bought a Holo May L2 on eBay in 2022 and whist it has extraordinary transparency with a noise floor down at -170dB, ultimately it did not warm the cockles of my heart, and it does demand fiddling around with HQ Player. So it went on eBay. The Aqua Formula xHD Rev.2 does warm the cockles of my heart. In theory it shouldn't work, but it does.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimbo
Innuos told me that the NG range was the Stream range that got out of control, so they went with it and then did Stream. I've never demo'd streamers. From 2010 I used Naim's n-Serve hosted on a device made by Ava Media, an Auralic Aries, Innuos Zen Mk3 and now Pulsar using Sense. The Ava blew up, my son has the Aries and I traded the Mk3. So fairly painless and not overly expensive. I have Roon, operating in up to 11 zones, but native Sense sounds better on the main hifi. I'm not sure I want to demo a £15,000 streamer!
The 301 aesthetics are a big thing to me, because it's in a nice room, but it does sound very good. I think the tonearms cost as much or more than the 301 itself. After a while I stopped counting. The Reed 3P is a lovely thing, wonderfully designed. I had in mind a Supatrac, but it's a bit of an ugly ducking and setting it up is more than I could contemplate.
At the end of the day, I wanted something vaguely natural-sounding and fun to listen to (although not all music is fun, some is not even music). If I want real, I pop in the car or get on the tube and go to Covent Garden or Wigmore Hall. Rather than preferring digital or analogue, these two source systems seem to be fairly well matched.
