Metrum Onyx versus Metrum Pavane

A general comment, those looking at high end Metrum DACs should investigate the Sonnet products devised by Cees, the engineer/founder of Metrum before it was sold. I had lots of Metrum products, and the Onyx was my favorite (only used the RCA input via a baby ambre so I can’t comment on USB, sorry!) They have not been responsive of late so I worry about ongoing support (in fact Cees himself is providing “unofficial” support for those products as you will find if you search various forums!) - their stuff is bulletproof in my experience so this post isn’t meant to scare you off buying Metrum, but the Sonnet Morpheus looks like the Adagio in performance for much less money.

I can’t comment on the Pavane but I feed my Onyx from the baby Ambre via spdif and it sounds better than when I had the USB connection from SoTM sms-200 (which was itself improved when I went through a schiit eitr to convert to spdif prior to getting the baby Ambre!) simpler is better, hence replacing both SoTM and eitr with baby Ambre. I still plan to go i2s from regular Ambre at some point in the future.