I sent Srajan an email last night and and his reply was very insightful. I thought those following this thread might be intersted.
Hi Srajan,
the APL NWO-M player is considered by many to be one of the very best digital sources, cost no object. What I find astonishing is the equal level of competition from the Metrum Octave mini DAC. The price ratio is an absurd, no make that staggering 43:1! How can that be? Have you ever come across another component that compares evenly performance wise at such a tiny fraction of cost to the other component? How Cees was able to do this is a wonder.
Charles
It's a bit of a mind bender. My friend has the same NWO-M. Except his has 24 x 32-bit AKM 4399s per channel (mine 'only' has 20). And he also has the Metrum. And in two recent comparisons of different ancillaries in his system which I attended, he also preferred the Metrum fed from the NWO-M's Esoteric transport. So the real math must add that portion of the NWO-M's price to the Metrum. This begins to shift the 43:1.
Even so it remains exceptional and surprising. Other listeners could prefer the NWO-M but it's certainly true that the Octave performs on the level. The best way I can hypothesize at this achievement is the FirstWatt factor. Just yesterday we compared Nelson's new S2 prototype at my friend's place to amps at 6 times the price, then replaced a $1.500 preamp with one that was 30 times costlier. The best sound came from the $1.500 preamp with the S2. That preamp has the simplest of circuits. It's fully balanced transformer attenuation and nothing else. The S2 amp is single-stage single-ended no feedback. Simple circuits executed well with superior core devices (a silicon-carbide static induction transistor or power JFet in the amp, Cees' secret 'super' chip in the DAC) can outperform far more complex circuits. And simple can mean affordable if the designers of such pieces don't dress them up with bling but apply a fair raw cost-to-build to retail multiplier.
In amplifiers, paralleling output devices as is necessary to obtain high power from a given part is known to incur performance sacrifices without certain extreme measures. In the NWO-M, Alex Peychev parallels DAC chips 'endlessly' and does the related circuit board work by hand rather than robotically. If you look at the size of the parts on those boards (tiny), you begin to appreciate the hand labor costs involved. But are 24 paralleled delta-sigma DACs wired up by hand automatically better than a superior R/2R chip paralleled four times and inserted robotically in someone else's machine - especially if the latter chips include I/V conversion and output buffering to eliminate two stages where the other machine includes a tube buffer stage and output transformers?
If simpler is better (within reason), more complex and far costlier can lose. The Metrum/NWO-M case seems to be a case in point. Which makes the NWO-M no less of an achievement. It's a complete universal player which includes a 24/192 async USB input. The Octave is just a DAC. But here's the thing. You can only write the way you think. Audio designers can only create sound the way they hear. If you like my self-taught creative way of reviewing better than that of a formally trained writer working for a corporate paper who can recite all the rules and regs of grammar to perfection, the latter's credentials don't come to bear. If you prefer the sonic ideals of a cheap machine's creator to that of a super-priced component, the latter's credentials don't factor. There are multiple layers to consider.
Srajan
