orgel

(Sorry for the belated response.) I am really enjoying the e32/PlayPoint combo — it sounds, to my ears, just like what I'm always going for, and that's as close to completely neutral as possible. Configuring the two devices is very, very easy — you can see that exaSound devoted a lot of thought to making them this way, especially the PlayPoint. Also, for someone who uses Roon and HQPlayer together, this is a really good choice, IMO. I can switch between using the PlayPoint as an HQP NAA and a Roon endpoint just by switching zones in the Roon control app. For anyone interested, Vade Forrester has a recent, thorough review of the combo in The Absolute Sound, Steven Plaskin has a detailed review of the e32 on AudioStream (which highlights use with HQP), and of course there's Chris's excellent write-up of the PlayPoint.

It's fine if you like the Yggdrasil; a lot of people do. But you really haven't established your credentials to allege that @Miska doesn't know what he's talking about. Here's what I know: DSD256 — 5 posts Miska — 8,361 posts and, oh yeah, he writes what I and many, many others consider to be the best playback software available. So maybe just ease up for a few thousand posts? --David

After WWII, my father-in-law devised a means of clearing land in East Africa for agricultural use that involved 2 surplus tanks and a chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme

Yeah, Brian acknowledged that. In Roon's favor, upsampling PCM to DSD is easy to configure. Without reinstalling Roon on my iMac, I can't do an apples-to-apples comparison with HQP, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how good Roon's SRC sounds. If the Roon guys are right about ROCK's capabilities, that could be a good one-cheap-box solution for a lot of people, IMO. Meanwhile, I'll be sticking with HQP for my upsampling/filtering needs. I just have too much good DSD64 source material to take the DSD-PCM-DSD hit. --David

Just received an email from Roon Labs stating that Roon 1.3 is being released today, so I'm starting this thread proactively. Here's the text of the email: --David

It's not often that I come away from a speaker review with anything more than "The reviewer really liked these speakers." This time, I got a lot of useful information I can apply in my own listening environment. Great job, and thanks for all your work on this. I hope you do many more reviews of this quality.

Cool add-on. I noticed that the Poly specs say it can do DSD512, but the Mojo only does DSD256. What to make of that? Mojo Mark II coming up? --David

FWIW, if you order the T+A directly from Rutherford Audio,, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and will pay for return shipping. I'm in a similar position to yours. After a fair amount of research and plenty of dithering, I'm down to choosing between the T+A and the exaSound e32. I'm currently leaning toward the e32. --David

I don't think the e28 had balanced outputs. (I think the DAC would need to be in a bigger case to accommodate them.) The e22/e32 does, however. --David

Based on what I see on the website, I'm pretty sure you'll be fine up to DSD128 under MacOS and up to DSD256 under Windows (and probably Linux, since the DAC uses an XMOS USB receiver). Also, there's quite a -05-portable-dac-amp-introduction-impressions'>lengthy thread about this DAC over at Head-Fi (which I didn't read much of). It says in there that the DAC supports DoP. (I'd quote what they say on the XDuoo website, except they've done the text as part of a graphic.) To be totally safe, you could contact XDuoo by email — there's an address on the website, in the "About" section — and ask them to confirm that the DAC supports DoP. On paper, the -05 looks like a very capable, reasonably priced portable DAC. (Someone at Head-Fi called it a poor man's Mojo.) If you end up buying it, please post your impressions. (Probably best if you do it in a new thread just for this DAC.) --David

You're right about the USB driver. Since the Brooklyn and the Manhattan II are both driverless for Mac & Linux, I doubt they'll ever fix that problem. If Mytek proves me wrong, I'll be happy, obviously. --David

I do enjoy organ music from time to time, but "Orgel" is my last name. My father told a story about the origin of the name that had my ancestors as organ makers in baroque-era Germany, but I believe the tale to have been apocryphal. --David

It's a little hard to say without knowing the particular DAC, but if the DAC can handle up to DSD128 via DoP, then your converter should allow that, given it can do 32/384. The coax input is your best bet for DSD. That said, you should check the specs for your DAC to make sure it can handle DoP via its coax S/PDIF input. You should also confirm by listening whether the USB or S/PDIF input sounds better. IMO, this varies quite a bit among DACs. --David

Like others, I'm really enjoying this thread. I think some of the info is starting to seep through the mostly impermeable barrier provided by my skull. I know this is tangential, but I wanted to add a note to something @Miska said… It appears that Resonessence is using the the same ESS ES9028PRO chip in its Invicta Pro, Invicta Mirus Pro, and Veritas DACs as exaSound is using in its e32. I don't think any of these does better than DSD256 — at least, none are advertised as doing DSD512. --David

… I hate saying this (it makes me sound like a pseudo-marxist) but MQA truly benefits the few at the cost of the many... This isn't a perfect analogy, but the "franchising" aspect of MQA reminds me of Kodak's PhotoCD program back in the 90s. (Oh, you don't remember PhotoCD? Oh, you don't remember Kodak?) At the time, I was working for a prepress service bureau, and the owner thought that PhotoCD would be a good way to expand business, so we trotted on up to Rochester, NY, got a really nice dog-and-pony show, and my boss decided to go for a PhotoCD setup, which consisted of a SPARCstation (Oh, you don't remember Sun?) running PhotoCD software, a very nice film scanner and a pretty nice flatbed scanner, and a PhotoCD writer (pretty much a regular CD-R burner, but those were a lot more expensive back then). At the time, this seemed like a reasonable decision and I had fun with the hardware, but within a couple of years it became clear that PhotoCD wasn't going to catch on in a big way, demand for PhotoCD died down, and that was more or less that. I think my boss broke even … maybe. Now, the PhotoCD workstation was more like $100K, vs $20K for the MQA setup, and PhotoCD was always going to be a temporary bridge technology (which wasn't nearly as clear at the time as it is in hindsight), but I can't help but notice some similarities. Playing the percentages, I think MQA likely won't become pervasive and all these little "MQA houses" will be left holding the collective bag. Just my opinion. --David