I just attended the Ayre demonstration of the QB-9 using the newest Ayre MX-R monoblocks, Wilson Sophia's. Steve Silberman was on hand to demo and did comparisons with the DX-5 beta product (to be released). He did A/B comparison with a Redbook Cd and complete explanation of the MAC and PC implementations. It was a very useful demo and convinced me the time has come to start ripping all my CD's.
I have to say, the QB-9 sounded great. Of course, the reference room at Music Lovers in Berkeley is pretty nice too, I don't have Wilson's, etc, so it hard to say what differences I would hear at home. I did not compare it to alternative DACs and wanted to hear the Berkeley Audio. Steve did start to convice me that SPDIF is a fundamentally flawed technology so that might rule that one out. The asynchronous implementation of USB really made sense to me and I have been developing and selling digital video technology for many years so I kind of get it.
Regardless, Ayre is a great company and the combination of a reasonably priced DAC with MP filtering, technical support,etc is just hard to beat. My Monarchy tube DAC (which sounds fine I might say) may hit the for sale ads soon.
I have to say, the QB-9 sounded great. Of course, the reference room at Music Lovers in Berkeley is pretty nice too, I don't have Wilson's, etc, so it hard to say what differences I would hear at home. I did not compare it to alternative DACs and wanted to hear the Berkeley Audio. Steve did start to convice me that SPDIF is a fundamentally flawed technology so that might rule that one out. The asynchronous implementation of USB really made sense to me and I have been developing and selling digital video technology for many years so I kind of get it.
Regardless, Ayre is a great company and the combination of a reasonably priced DAC with MP filtering, technical support,etc is just hard to beat. My Monarchy tube DAC (which sounds fine I might say) may hit the for sale ads soon.