Does anyone have a digital system that is as involving as their analogue front end?

@audphile1 

My original question was whether digital could be as involving as analogue. This is. I'm listening to Graceland because I'm very familiar with the album. I haven't done an A/B test, but it is as involving as analogue. 

Question: before you considered the upgrade (which I won't be able to purchase probably for a year) did you consider putting a transport on instead?

Also, Jplay doesn't show nearly as many albums as Moon's Mind2 or Qobuz connect. I couldn't find Graceland under Paul Simon's name, so I had to type in the album name.

@audio-b-dog 

Meitner DAC is very good and I’m not surprised you like it and find its presentation engaging and musical.

As I mentioned earlier I had the original MA3 for about two weeks but returned it after weighing the options a bit better. I then purchased a brand new MA3i without even hearing it in my system based on how much I liked the MA3 and my conversations with few folks over at EMM Labs. It worked out well as selling the dac and the streamer I replaced with the Meitner funded the large portion of the purchase. 

Having heard both versions of this DAC, I would 100% send it in for an upgrade. The improvements are well worth it. 
 

As to transports, I tried a few. It’s very good with CDs but honestly if the master is the same on streaming as the CD you own, no need to bother with CD. 
 

When you’re doing search on artist in jplay make sure you hit the Artists tab  - default search will be on Albums which explains why you couldn’t find it when yiu typed paul simon. Hit artists tab when you search for artists and hit albums tab when searching for albums.
The app works wonderfully. I love it  

Click on paul simon. Graceland is the 3rd album 

@audphile1 

Thankyou for the info. I will be evaluating the Meitner MA3 for quite a while. I'm now playing an old 44.1 ablum of Bruno Walter conducting Brahms' 4th. At 96 kHz and above, the Meitner is amazing. I'm checking it out on an older 44.1 album. Not nearly as good at hi-rez, but very listenable. I like old Bruno's interpretation too.

I can get a glimmer of what your upgrade did. Focused things, if I can use one word. Perhaps like going from an older tube preamp to a newer, tighter one. If I can never upgrade it, though, I could listen to it like this and be happy.

Yes a lot depends on a source material. No matter how good the DAC is, garbage in garbage out. 
I’m fairly certain that you will ditch playing CDs unless the recording is something you can’t find on streaming or streaming sounds bad due to bad quality source, which is the remastered crap in most cases.