Just to pick up on a few strands in this thread ...
Went round to Justin's this afternoon for a bit of a play. I probably shouldn't have been surprised (given what I know about Chris's musical preferences) but I was actually quite taken aback at the commonalities between his Apogees and big Tannoys dual concentrics in terms of room-energising scale, and fleshy, bold presentation. (Also love his monster 211s which I'm sure would drive any Tannoys beautifully). Quite different in weight and colour palate to any Quads I've owned, or indeed any panel speaker I've heard previously, perhaps with the exception of some 60,000 Euro Silbertones one at the Munich show. (Which interestingly were also driven by push-pull 211s ... hmmm).
However on the Xiang Sheng DAC ... this was definitely throwing out some distortion which was especially apparent on classical vocals. Whether this is a characteristic of the DAC or whether it's a fault in Justin's own one I'm not clear on but there's definitely something up with what we were hearing. The distortion went away when we put in my Schiit Modi Multibit, though from cold, it sounded very grey in comparison to the Chinese DAC ... thankfully the colour came back after about 30 mins, the Schiit does run quite hot after a period so do I wonder if there's some class A circuitry in the output stage that needs bringing up to temperature before proper listening. Anyone else having issues with the Xiang Sheng?