@no_regrets - Interesting idea but I am not confident in my ability to create a YouTube video that would accurately exhibit what I am hearing. I have listened to some of those YouTube audio equipment review videos and I doubt what I heard was close to how it sounded in the poster’s room.
The other thing is, the units I have here now certainly do not sound night and day different from each other (IMO) and, particularly with the three Mojo Audio models, the differences I hear are nuanced rather than overtly obvious. They are all good sounding DACs but, at least in the price range of the DACs I have been listening to, the state of digital audio industry seems to be progressing more incrementally than monumentally. It is sort of like stepping half the distance to a wall, the closer you get to the wall, the smaller the steps. The steps involved in improving digital audio seemed to have been bigger ten years ago.
The Aries Cerat Helene brings some attributes to the party that I like hearing, and that I might describe as the Mojo Audio house sound on steroids, taking the good stuff I hear from Benjamin’s latest DACs and adding just a little bit more. I have no idea of what specific design choices result in what I am hearing from the Helene but the suspects might include the multiple DAC chips, tube rectified power supply, double re-clocking Super Clock technology, tube output stage, expensive transformers, general overbuilt construction, or all of it together. In this case, paying a lot more seems to bring an improvement but, the additional cost is high considering you can get close with one of the Mojo Audio DACs, including the Z NC that, with the current sale pricing, is just over half the list price of the Helene. I have no idea what further improvements beyond the Helene could be heard from DACs at even higher prices of $30K+ like the dCS Rossini APEX, EMM Labs DV2i, Totaldac d1-sublime, MSB Premier, or others, because I haven’t heard any of them.
