has anyone tried PS Audio perfect wave duo

There are well known and praised digital front end systems on the market listed at $68,500, $29,000, and…I don’t know off the top of my head what MBL’s best are listed at. Now, we have the Perfect Wave system listed at $6,000. Comparatively speaking, this cannot be considered “over-priced.” I just bought the PWD for $2,000 (plus trade in). I have written about what this system sounds like. It does not deserve comparison to the DACs that I am familiar with in the $5,000 and under sector. The PWT/PWT should be compared to the super high-end digital front end systems on the market. It may, or may not hold its own with such products, but I can verify that it is superior to most of the well mentioned systems. Personally, I have opted for the forthcoming Bridge instead of the PWT (transport). To me, a high-end music server makes more sense – why bother with individual CDs…

2chnlben, if I understand this right, the Perfect Wave merely reads the cd into flash memory and then replays it. Why this is then not added to a hard drive seems unfortunate to me, but I can see why a perfect copy would be better than relying on the cd player to get the data just in time to send it on.

I have not heard a demonstration of hard drive to flash drive for replay versus straight from hard drive. Perhaps this does make a difference.

I suspect that it is not flash memory which is being used, but rather dynamic RAM (random access memory), similar to computer RAM memory except with much less capacity. Hard drives and flash memory retain what has been stored when power is turned off, while dynamic RAM does not. However, RAM is much faster, and also cheaper and more compact. Also, flash memory has a limited number of write cycles it can handle before failing, the number being fairly large but potentially a significant factor in cdp or transport lifespan. And it requires sophisticated memory management algorithms to minimize that limitation.

In principle a transport could certainly be designed to utilize either a hard drive or a flash memory, but it would add to the cost and complexity, without providing added value for many or most users.

Regards,
-- Al

Almarg, I think the Memory Player uses flash memory or claims to. I don't remember whether it retains its information, however. What is in this memory can then to downloaded to the hard drive.

Tbg -- From the owner's manual:

The memory for the PWT is not located in the rear SD card as is commonly assumed. The rear panel SD card holds the cover art and song title information as it is acquired. In addition, the SD card is used to program new firmware in the PWT.

The SD card is flash memory, of course, but as this indicates it is not what is used as the buffer memory for the music.

Regards,
-- Al