My HiFace Evo has recently returned from the Outer Hebrides, having been treated to bespoke internal regulators by Paul Hynes. Here is a pic of its innards:



It's not possible to do a back-to-back comparison with the unmodified Evo, but I have to say that the sounds emerging via a Win7 Netbook running J River Media Center 16, through the Evo into my Lyngdorf digital amp, are fantastic. Even the (supposedly) high-res 24/96 download of Steely Dan's Gaucho sounds great, where before the Evo upgrade it did not sound very special at all, certainly in comparison to the LP. Ordinary CDs ripped to FLAC as well as the proper high-res stuff that I have bought from Linn and 2L all sound magical - rich, detailed, organic - in fact quite like vinyl, which is a Good Thing in my view. The Evo is powered by one of Paul's SR3 PSUs, set at 7v.

I do think that now, with the modded Evo, I'm close to the Holy Grail of a streaming digital audio chain that ticks my important musical boxes, by which I mean something that will happily sit alongside vinyl replay, rather than being the poor relation. The little MSI netbook is actually a pretty good music server, but a new media PC is in the making, based around the same Asus mini-ITX Atom motherboard that Jason used in the early NVA TFS, but without a supplementary sound card and powered by my Paul Hynes SR5 PSU. I have high hopes for the combination of the new PC and the Evo, and look forward to participating in a bake-off sometime. Shame that I was never going to be available for Richard's bake-off, 'cos I think he'd be quite impressed with the modded Evo.