Aries-Cerat DAC's

Hmm…I was reading Christopher Punter’s review of the Helene last night (HiFi Advice) and he sure seemed to refer to it as warm sounding.

@verdantaudio if you will, please compare / contrast the Helene to the MPD-8. Assume a highly resolving amplification path and neutral - high resolution speakers like ATC , Wilson.

thx 

my experience is that these are both insanely good DACs but are slightly different flavors.  The AC is dead neutral while the Playback is a hair warm of neutral.  The Helene is very balanced in terms of depth and scale of image while the Playback is also balanced but may have slightly better depth than the Helene but Helene has better scale.  The Helene has a bit more texture, I think due to 2nd order harmonics from the tube stage where there is something Andreas does in the algorithm in his filter that is incredibly musical and engaging.  

These are both stunning DACs that are easy to listen too yet are also revealing and incredibly musical.  You will be fine with either DAC.  The Playback is slightly lower maintenance due to lack of tubes and the driver tubes that AC uses are pricey and need to be replaced with some frequency if you leave the DAC on all the time which some people certainly do.  The Helene takes a bit longer to warm up and sound great compared to the Playback.  

I offer only one warnings about playback, if you have too much midrange magic (MOSFET amp, Neutral speakers with a ribbon or AMT) you can get some midrange bloat.  I have had this happen with VAC preamps, Audia Flight Amplification and a few other scenarios with Raidho and Audiovector speakers or in the case of the VAC Master Pre, tube amps were enough.  It is very uncommon but is immediately obvious and the system just sounds awful.  AC won't have this issue

@verdantaudio thank you for your detailed response! That “awful” result with some other components almost seems like an impedance mismatch somewhere. In any case I was just curious how these two DACS compare.

thanks again!