I own a cd7 and have heard the ref dac and the cd 9. i can say that cd 9 is way superior to the cd7. i was also able to hear a cd5 on its own and then connected to the ref dac using the cd5 solely as a transport...night and day is an understatement !!. When i asked if the cd9 had a scaled down dac to that in the ref dac i was told it was the other way round as there were less competing electronics (transport/dac) in the cd9 as compared with the pre amp/dac in the ref dac and thus it was closer to a pure dac. I seem to remember dac 8 was one of those rare arc products that was a bit underwhelming.
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