@benzman These kinds of questions are hard to answer to my way of thinking. With each of us likely having totally unique systems, generalizations hard to ascertain. Having said that, based on my experience and others, I'd say the number one or most salient feature of this dac is it's incredible resolving capabilities. Flavor is where differences may come to fore, between systems and listener's sound quality preferences come to color their evaluations. Having said that, I have yet to see someone describing this dac as warm, I'm in total agreement there. Yet, this dac not clinical or cold, and I've yet to see someone describing it in this manner as well. So what are we left with, total neutrality? Seems really bizarre that with all manner of systems, 005 seems to continually land here, makes one wonder about the actual existence of a truly neutral sounding audio component?
My take is the 005 simply resolves at such a high level it may be novelty of sudden newfound information that mesmerizes in short term. Over the long term, as one gets acclimated to hearing what was formerly omitted, we begin to ascertain flavor. Even after nearly two years of ownership and many changes within my system I continue to have great difficulty in describing some sort of overarching flavor of this dac. There was a single short lived time where I thought it somewhat analytical after what turned out to be an ill thought change. Mostly what I hear is live performers in room, actual real organic presences, not a lot of thinking or imagination required to get this sense. So, bottom line for me, extreme resolution with natural flavor, I feel no desire to even try another dac at any price.
The strangest thing about owning this dac for me is it's relatively low price of $3k. By all rights total cost of my system should call for $10k up dac, and I often feel this bias that 005 is too cheap, couldn't possibly be the best I could do, and then next listening session eliminates that thought from my mind. At some point I may have to scratch this itch and purchase $10k up dac.
Trying to bring this back to a more general sense of interest. My active pre and amps are both directly heated triode tubes, 300BSET and 845SET, way modded Klipshcorns which are extremely resolving and great pains to provide natural timbre which stock Klipsch doesn't do so well. But then I've also used 005 with more modest equipment like Schitt Saga+ pre, Prima Luna Dialogue Four push pull amp and Musical Fidelity M2SI integrated amp. I never felt extremely deprived with any of it, and never heard sins of commission. All in all, my experience and what I'm hearing from others is 005 is just fine in many different systems. Still waiting to see the first negative review.
