What CDP gets really close to vinyl?

Mapman I received the Mhdt Havana yesterday. It was shipped from Taiwan on Friday, can you believe that?!

This DAC reminds me of a great SET amp except it is extended in the upper frequencies, well I should say my system really permits this with this DAC without any irritating digital artifacts. The natural decay of instruments and the ability to focus in on the performance rather that the sound is quite remarkable. The experience reminds me of years ago listening to the beautiful Joule OTL operating at zero feedback with my vinyl rig. Huge soundstage (more of a wow factor than anything musically important to me), great transparency,liquid without sounding dark and syrupy, tonally it really nails it which permits total involvement with the music without any desire to critically dissect the sound, this is a good sign.

I haven't heard many new ones lately but I do believe for the price this DAC in the right system is quite a performer that has a sense of continuousness similar to really good analog, at least in my set-up. It is about the music for sure. Thank you for making me aware of Mhdt, it is a very special piece.

Tubegroover,

Glad to hear that!

Love seeing a new convert to NOS. Hopefully the Havanah has more spark than the stock Audio Note. Not to say the AN lack of spark can't be rectified.

Muralman I don't know exactly what you mean by more spark. I don't want the above comments to reflect an opinion that digital has finally arrived at where vinyl has evolved to. I'm not too sure about that but I can say this DAC does a lot of things right including the timing cues that you hear in live music and great analog and separates a performance from good sound. I really felt that listening to some CD's was for the first time and it didn't make any difference whether they were great or mediocre recordings. The Havana gets the timing right like analog. Further listening is in order to make more critical judgements on its absolute performance with regard to air above and around instruments which is one of the hallmarks of great analog IMHO. I suspect that the unit needs some breakin before I can determine what it is truly capable of.

As one of the above posters above Kjo notes, the Audio Aero Capitol is very analog sounding. It is probably the best digital I have heard to date in an extremely resolving system. I'm sure there is as good or better but the key here is to have a system capable of hearing these subtle differences as Muralman notes. This is important as the source is only as good as what follows. I do have a sense of what I have read in this thread that NOS DACs may be a great solution in some systems but may not work in all. I doubt one size fits all but I can say in my highly evolved all tube system which has been a work in progress over the past 10 years it works well indeed.

Not that my rig is SOTA, but having heard many SOTA setups, I think that practically it competes well, and I am challenged to hear any practical difference between my digital and vinyl (other than surface noise with vinyl).

I have things tuned so that my digital and vinyl sound most similar using the Constantine on my main rig, and the Paradisea on my 2 channel A/V system.

The important thing is to have a good reference standard to go by. If you have good vinyl as a reference standard, then I find the digital can be practically tuned to come very close. However, there may be more involved than just swapping on digital player for another. You have to really pay attention to all teh possibilites that determine the resulting sound. Not easy....

I am big on air, sound stage, and imaging and my system does very well in this regard with both digital and vinyl.