[BillK]

I'll give it until Monday and see what I hear over the weekend at RMAF.

The way I have described Wadia before is that the DirectStream sounds great for digital right now but the Wadia sounds like music.

Update:

Interesting. Just for grins I compared Redbook and while the DirectStream blows away the Oppo UDP-205 on SACD, for Redbook it's the opposite, with the UDP-205 being almost as good as the Wadia; the piano sounds like piano, the guitar like guitar but the Oppo doesn't quite have the space around instruments the Wadia does.

However to my ears the Oppo does not have the harsh leading edge to piano keys and guitar string plucks the DS DAC seems to, at least running Huron.

I tried connecting the Memory Player to the DS DAC using AES/EBU and Toslink just to see if either of those would make a difference as compared to I2S for Redbook, but they all sounded pretty much the same and just as "edgy."

Update 2:

I confirmed the same edge to piano keys and guitar strings on the DirectStream DAC Paul was demoing at RMAF, so it's wasn't burn-in.

Ted suggested dropping back to Torreys and that ameliorated about 90% of it, but lost a fair degree of spatial resolution as well.

In short, Torreys sounds like about 90% of what I get with the Wadia; Huron just seems to sound nasty with Redbook, or at least with the particular torture tracks I have.