Originally Posted by
brian2957
Sorry I'm late to this thread guys , been working all day .Firstly I would like to thank Gaz for inviting us into his home and provding me with food , copious amounts of coffee , and a very interesting day. And also thanks to Ali for giving us access to his excellent and interesting valve amps and DAC. I have to say that I agree with everything that Gary and Ali have written in their excellent reviews. Alis' valve DAC was indeed excellent through the Rega Brio R and came into its' own when used with the valve amps.
I think the Rega DAC , for a cheaper and commercially available DAC was a pretty close second . In my opinion the fully specced Caiman did sound pretty good in the scheme of things. The Bushmaster did not sound as good , to my ears , on the day. One thing that has been niggling me all day today was the fact that the Bushmaster had been given around 96 hours of use / burn-in. Perhaps Gary will correct me if I'm wrong here as we had to use his system since my laptop simply would not work with the Bushmaster. Was this enough burn-in ?
This may or may not be a relevent point . The bottom line was that we all came to more or less the same conclusions on the day using all four DACs on two different systems , solid state and valve.
Brian.