Vintage Levinson DACs

i now have an Emm lab cdp - I finally advanced/upgraded mainly to listen to SACD's. the new player sounds very good, no complaints there. but i never had that "day versus night" experience when i got it. not so when i upgraded years ago to my ML-37/360S combo which sounded so smooth and was just a sheer pleasure to listen to. plus it had the HDCD decoding feature which i really enjoyed as well. that is why i still keep a ML-390S cdp around as a back-up.

Hi George,

I can honestly say that I have never bought a new piece of gear because it's the latest and greatest. I'm always curious about new stuff, but take all the hype with a grain of salt. I have had now for close to four years my AA Tube Hybrid Reference DAC and have found none of the new DACS to sound better, maybe different, to purchase a different DAC. Also I had the great fortune to score the reference MBL transport, to replace its smaller brother, which sonicly lead to an improvement that was quite noticable.

I think the ML pieces are "classics" and at the time were built to beautiful standards, however, they sonicly are not on the same level in their performance compared with the top reference level digital gear now.

I don't change gear very often but when I do it's only because I believe I'm getting more of the illusion of real music in my system, not because I need a new toy to play with.

Hi George,
I readily admit that when I owned Levinson Reference, I too disagreed with Teajay concerning the Levinson's sound. It did and still does sound excellent with the ability to pull the listener into the music. But after hearing a few other DACs, (I'm not the busy auditioner Teajay is!) I heard what he was talking about. I still miss my Levinson pieces, but was not about to get stuck with them.

I'm very happy with my 37/360s combo and see no reason to replace them anytime soon. Redbook CDs sound great, 24/96 sources are even better, and for simplicity I upsample flac (via software) to 24/96 from my Mac mini. Is there better out there sure... But at what cost?