@jjss49 No question a well executed tube based output stage can be extraordinary. When reviews are available I try to avoid reading them till after I form my own opinion and see if I agree.
The secondary element that I think helps in a BIG way is the outboard power supply. And I am not sure it has to be outboard but having an enhanced power supply makes a huge difference. Yesterday I did some testing with a few Chord devices and some external Sean Jacobs power supplies and the differences were noteworthy.
@sutts I am really intrigued by Aries Cerat. I would love to get one in on demo for a stretch.
@chayro I could not agree with you more. Chip vs. FPGA vs. R2R biases are driven by perceptions that have nothing to do with what they are capable of. If you compare the Playback (FPGA), Jadis (Chip) and Rockna (R2R), most assumptions are literally turned on their heads with these three devices.
A belief that off the shelf chips are inferior is literal madness to me. You have a team of engineers working to produce a chip. R2R is driven by QC and what you spend on the resistor ladder (why MSB and Rockna are so good) vs FPGA where you probably have one guy designing the chip. Just fine when that person is Andreas Koch, Nicloae Jitaru or Rob Watts, but I would not have faith that any FPGA delta sigma will perform as well as any chip based delta sigma without knowing who the designer is.
The real issue with off the shelf chips is the perception that "newer is always better" so when a new chip comes out, a DAC is perceived as inferior if it doesn't have that latest, greatest chip. R2R DACs and FPGA DACs are immune to this due to the lack of simple comparability.