Sounded like fun. I don’t have the Delux version. But I do have an audiophile 180gram pressing of Madman across the water manufactured by DCC. I have a great analog and digital ends… see my user ID.
It is easy for me to synch them and volume equalizes them and switch back and forth. They sound the same to me. I kept thinking I was listening to one and realizing it is the other.
I have:
Linn LP12, Koetsu Rosewood Signature cartridge and a Audio Research Reference 3 phonostage
Digital is a Aurender W20SE streamer, an Audio Research CD9SE DAC / player.
I don’t think there is a large population that have equally costly rigs that sound the same. Right mine my digital rig is about $5K more expensive than my analog.. ~ $42K for digital and ~ $37K for analog. I will be receiving $5K of analog upgrades soon… bringing them to equality. I don’t think it is going to be earth shattering improvement, they are both very good reproductions of the material they are fed.
One could argue that my analog / digital ends are the same by subtracting $5K for the transport in my DAC. On the other hand using the $22K Berkeley Reference DAC the results were the same. Choosing components can easily mitigate small differences in the cost equation.
I am a member of a forum that has lots of folks with $100K and much higher analog and digital ends. I think the consensus is that analog has about a 10% advantage in well chosen high end systems… all the way up… we are talking million dollar systems.
This advantage is small in comparison to what it used to be. So, depending how good you are at putting together systems you could easy consider it equal.
This advantage will not last for long. Qobuz offers lots of high Rez recordings, over time most will be. Aurender offer streamers capable of similar performance at the level of the turn table I have. Then you need a Phonostage for analog and DAC for digital.
