Charles Hansen of Ayre, Mark Waldrep or AIX and Bob Stuart, among many other leading pundits in the industry consider DSD to be a compromised format due to the inherent high level noise caused by the DSD encoding process itself.....and in their considered minds, DSD can never sound "better" than PCM as a result

Perhaps DSD can sound DIFFERENT......but not better, in their considered and expertise based opinions

It's quite possible (however unlikely) that the souped Aries MAY sound better than the MS600 or even the 818........but it won't sound better just because it's $1,500....... or that it has an LPS ............or that it plays DSD files.......it MAY only sound better if the Engineering and Development are of the quality required to reach such a high level of performance

And so until the Aries' performance bona fides have been established in listening tests, does it really deserve to be mentioned here as being a legitimate competitor to the clearly established performance levels of the MS600 or 818??

The main point here is that it would be misleading to assume that an 818 with Digital Out only would be cheaper than the standard 818, given ALL of the above mentioned development costs involved in developing that new SKU

Last edited by Ronnie; 2014-09-07 04:07.
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