Aesthetix Romulus Signature Upgrade Worth the $3,000 ?


Hi all,

I just purchased a "base" Aesthetix Romulus and am very happy with it. Has anyone had their unit upgraded to Signature or heard the base unit and Signature unit side by side? I am wondering what the sonic differences were and if you think it is a worthwhile upgrade. The vast majority of my units use is spinning cd's on a high resolution system. I would be particularly interested in the difference in dynamics and bass extension with the upgrade.

Thanks for looking!!

billandsol
Tomic, I do understand your point being in innovation & product development. Yes it is part of the cost and spread out over a relatively few units unfortunately. Good point. 

Charles, on Red Book CD spinning the Yammy is a great value and to my ears competes with many bigger dollar units.  You could combine it with a nice Emperical Audio Offramp for great computer audio also. 
As I stated in my first post in this thread, I tend to agree that the cost to upgrade the Romulus to Signature status is on the high side; however I bought my std unit used with the intent to do the upgrade since dsd playback capability was/is very important to me.  With the total cash outlay I have in my unit, given the price I paid for it used plus the upgrade cost, I'm more than happy with my total cost. 

IMHO Jim White is one of the best with respect to digital playback design. I am extremely disappointed that the Signature version still won't do dsd via its spdif inputs despite it still being marketed as having that capability!!  In correspondence with Jim a year ago about this issue he indicated that this feature would indeed become operational, but to my knowledge it is not (recent query to customer service about this remains unanswered). 

During our correspondence Jim asked what other features I'd like to see; I told him that adding I2S input would be great. 
I should make a comment here on the wonderful Star Sound Apprentice stand. I use the less expensive Adona coupling discs and they may not extract the very best performance from these stands. I just am not sure.  I will try the Star Sound coupling discs and see if they make any difference. Just a caution to those reading this thread.