Review on Linear Tube Audio Aero DAC

Stereophile review by HR was very positive too however Atkinson tested it and had issues wherein

..."The Linear Tube Audio Aero's measured performance is paradoxical. As I pointed out in my Richard Heyser Memorial lecture at the 131st Audio Engineering Society Convention in 2011, people tend to like the sound of nonoversampling DACs that dispense with the usual reconstruction filter, perhaps due to their accurate time-domain behavior. But the price paid for this benefit is the presence of a large number of aliased products in the audioband with high-level, high-frequency audio data. And although the Aero's distortion signature is dominated by the subjectively benign second harmonic, this probably won't be of concern, at least from the balanced outputs. I was puzzled by the fact that this harmonic was so much higher from the unbalanced outputs, though this discrepancy is mentioned in the Aero's specifications.—John Atkinson 

@mitch2 

Curious to hear your impressions after burn-in of both Merason and LTA. My CD transport is optimized for AES/EBU and sounds much better than SPDIF on my Merason Dac1 MKII. 

Wig

Thanks for the heads up @wig 

The LTA Aero has been burning in for a couple of days and, after a frustrating week of dealing with customs, the Merason is scheduled to be delivered this afternoon.  By running the USB output from my Sonore Signature Rendu SE Optical into a Singxer DDC, I have a variety of outputs I can simultaneously use from the DDC to feed the DACs I am comparing, so it will be easy to try the Merason with AES/EBU.

@mitch2

Awesome and fun times ahead.

Wig 😊

@mitch2 Congrats on the new LTA Aero!  I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts and comments about how it sounds compared to the other dacs you have experience with!

I have one on order, probable about 3 weeks out before receiving though.

When talking to the very fine folks at LTA, they gave me the impression that they didn't expect the Aero to sound any different no matter which input you use on their dac.  Although, I wonder if some transports or digital sources themselves may be better optimized via their certain output connections?

I'm very happy to hear that it was packed very well and shipped very safely! Also glad to hear it's sounding good right out of the box.  I can only imagine that their "pre"-burn in process prior to shipment only helps in that matter!

Best wishes,

Don