Yes. They are using a very high end DAC with special power supplies etc... I'm hoping that it will be a better DAC overall. As a server, there is nothing even remotely close in sound quality. it's THAT good. Blows the Aurender W20/N10 out of the water, plus with integrated DAC, there is no cable so no extra jitter problems. The hard drive is a non fragmented one and they can take my external music and defragment that also. That cuts jitter to negligible. No time smearing etc... check it out.
www.thememoryplayer.net If Richard V's new mono's are as good as I'm told they are (from someone who's heard them), then I'll be selling teh Ayre AX5/20 also and getting those with an LS28 used or something like that.
I will be selling the QX5 though, but will miss it greatly. Folks don't realize just how great a product it is for the headphone to the control station it is and then the sound quality is sublime for an under 10k DAC and I've heard many many of them that cost much much more. Fast and musical. They know how to implement things at Ayre. That's for sure.