Telstar

Barrows, If Peter's "Predictive Arc" approach really is so revolutionary, I still wish he would license it for use inside DACs. Now, there are certainly DSP chips with enough power to run his approach, and this way more audiophiles could take advantage of his work (and he might be able to make a little money too). Not everyone wants to have to use XXHighend and his DAC. I dont think there currently are DSP chips with enough power. On windows,xxhighend player 8X AP uses about the power of a dualcore 2ghz intel C2D. And it's completely multicore/multithreading. Mani uses a 6-core HT xeon IIRC. Maybe in 3-4 years.

Juli@ is 4 channel. You may also look for the Infrasonic Quartet eeprom (dunno, but SIMS support at least is good), which is based on the same via envy chipset.

Interesting topic (cant find the subscribe anymore)

Chris, I guess that Peter's interest is no more no less like Gordon or Pat (art) here, with the only difference that his electronics are not on the market yet.

What barrows said apply for me too AKM dacs are indeed a strange breed and it is probably the main reason why the MH ULN8 sounds good (havent heard it yet, but I have listened to other AKM based units).

Telstar: I disagree entirely that class A circuits are colored by nature. I cannot speak specifically to the Plinius gear (and many amps that use the class A moniker are not truly class A) but the technical fact is that a class A circuit has less distortion than a class A/B circuit. I didnt say that. I said exactly that the Plinius Reference amp IS colored in class A mode, having done comparison with a bunch of friends. Most of us preferred it in class AB mode - the difference was quite obvious, especially on the voices.

timztunz, I agree with you. If highres files do not matter, by all means the Tranquillity DAC seems a very fine unit. They took care of some details that are often ignored but that matters a lot to the sound (see also my reply on audiocircle). enjoy the music

Try the reference in class AB mode. It's less colored and more natural. It's class A sound is an example of a painted tone that is farther from truth.

I've checked the thread over audiocircle and the designer did many things "right". The main issue is the low resolution that downsample any highres file sent by the computer, which is definitely "wrong"

PS, Kudos to the Ayre dealers, who seem quite hip to the break-in issue. This is the second post in 24 hours where a fully broken in Ayre QB-9 (which seem to require an interminable amount of time to break-in) have won out over other DACs I noticed the same thing...

Note that the QBD76 is a much better unit than the DAC64. The comments about sterile hyperdetailed sound do not apply to the new model. I wonder why it didnt get the press success it deserves.

I also use Izotope Ozone, not for upsampling but for crossover and equalization and I have found it better than anything else that I have tried, which includes all sort of Waves plugins, and many less famous.

So, did you buy the Magnepan, Socrates?

very interested

The very few people who do an active crossover with the computer. You need two channels for each "way" of your speakers. Two friends of mine use the apogee ensamble, but i'm sure that the ULN sound quality is better.