Originally Posted by Ronnie
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
I wonder what they think about LAN isolation...

Originally Posted by Ronnie
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
What I was thinking was how would an Aries into an DSP SE speaker sound like compared to 818 into non SE DSP speaker, i.e. spend the saving on an SE upgrade. I don't think it will sound better because it's cheaper, no.

Originally Posted by Ronnie
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
I think the point is that you are paying for a pre-amp, DACs and a USB card that some (me) don't want and won't use. Seems a waste of good engineering.