After only 24 hours of burning in here are my initial impressions ... WOW!!! :-)
I think the biggest thing I'm noticing so far is just a sense of rightness with everything I'm hearing. Instruments just seem more natural like how a Sax has a sense of body when you hear it live ... I'm getting a lot of that with this DAC already. The sense of air around instruments is getting better by the hour and the sense of depth is kind of what I expected since I have a PH 8 for Vinyl. Voices are certainly front and center and really stand out from the rest of the music if that's how it was recorded. The detail is really good but I'm not going to call it hyper detailed by any means ... again just seems right. One other thing that I've noticed that for me is huge is that usually listening to digital can induce listening fatigue for me pretty quickly even at lower volumes. With this baby I'm not getting any sense of fatigue setting in a all. Not to say that the highs aren't there because they certainly are ... just no etch or edginess to them at all. Back in the early 90's I bought a California Audio Labs Aria Mk III and at once I realized it was very special. The DAC 9 immediately gives me that same sense of being very special that I've only really experienced once oh so many years ago so needless to say I can't wait to see how good it can really get after breaking in all the way. Once I get 200 hours on it I'll report back and do some comparison between some of my hi-res files through the DAC 9 and Vinyl with the PH 8. What I can say already is that out of the box it is in an entirely different world than my old Mark Levinson No 360s which was no slouch up to 96k. Merry Christmas everyone!
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