LAIV Harmony

Thanks @jackd. This is exactly the review I’ve been wanting to read. 

I respect Hans review, if thats what he heard in his system, so be it. I’d say his review is spot on however I still do not hear brightness in my system.

Brightness and silibance have me scratching my head...Wondering if removing the "Bridge" between the boards cause some type of instability within the circuit?

Wig

@jackd Thanks for sharing your impressions.

I too am considering the LAiV Harmony, and the closest contenders in my mind are the Denafrips Pontus II 15th or Venus II 12th-1. I mention the Pontus 15th because this new version appears to use the same resistor ladder as the Venus, and the main difference between the two units seems to be the clock. Does anyone have any thoughts regarding how either one of these would compare to the Harmony? Only small minus on the Harmony is that it converts DSD to PCM vs the Denafrips units that handle DSD natively. But if the sound quality of the Harmony is significantly better than the Pontus or Venus, the DSD issue would be acceptable,

Regarding Hans’ review... The only time my Harmony sounded remotely close is during testing when I plugged it into the high current outlets of my Furman IT-Reference 20i. Going back to the balanced outlets marked a huge improvement for me within my system (so much so I just ordered an Audioquest Niagara 7000). I’ve mentioned this previously, but my experience is the Harmony is extremely sensitive to system issues and will happily expose them, so my best guess is there’s something in Hans’ chain that needs tweaking.

There have been some reports on Head-Fi in regards to testing NOS/OS and the consensus is there’s some high frequency roll-off with NOS so the "sibilance" claims are very puzzling and I’d again point to one of the many upstream device Hans has piping music into the Harmony. Some users have reported excellent results with NOS and HQPlayer, which I’m tempted to try, but personally, Harmony in OS has been very impressive.