Has anyone heard the PS Direct stream mk2?

One thing we know is that it is louder so that HAS to make it sound better, right?

Yep, I have one and am currently enjoying it a lot. I think with the current trade in value, it makes a lot of sense for someone who likes the mk1. If you want to try something entirely different though, there are plenty of other ways to spend your money.

driftingbunnies- your last sentence kind of sums it up- for $8k ish, there are lots of options.  

You don't have to trade your Mk I in before you receive the Mk II.  You have thirty days to send one of them back to either complete or void the trade.  So a chance to compare head to head.  Before you see any independent reviews the trade in offer will be long gone.  There are multiple people on the PS forum who have compared the Mk II to a bone standard Mk I and various modded versions and all claim the Mk II is clearly better than even the "full modded" Mk I.  Several of those are people whose ears I trust and if I needed another DAC wouldn't hesitate to try it as I own a modded Mk I.

Looks like there is less than one hour left to do the trade in. Hurry! lol-

My MKII will be here in a couple of weeks, but I don’t have a MKI on hand to compare. I’ll just have to go from memory. My MKI was not modded. I used the Bridge II card with an EtheRegen and got really good results. I’ve read the MKII has already been compared with the Tambaqui and sounded better, and equaled a $14.5K dac I forgot.

The thing I like about what PS/Ted Smith is doing is the generous trade in (my MKI started life as a Perfectwave, then upgraded with DS kit) and how they evolve via OS updates. I liked hearing the MKI evolve from the first release to the final one. It was a fun ride and was free to hear. PFGAs create a new circuit inside a sea of gates, so it sort of is a new machine every time they update.

With the MKII, Ted revealed via youtube video he isn’t even using the second FPGA yet. He has some ideas about using one for L, the other for R, or different FPGA’s for different functions.

The unit already is being said to sound fantastic, and who knows where Ted’s experiments may lead in the coming years.

All the things he learned over the years of developing new OS for the mkI, he implemented in the hardware of the MKII, which also has much better transformers than the MKI.

Also the ability to replace with an even higher end transformer, would take the DAC into much higher levels. It my mind it makes it a good value for a Dac I won’t need to replace for probably another 8 years.