Review on Linear Tube Audio Aero DAC

Hey brbrock,

I know that LTA uses high quality internal parts in all their products. If you want precisely to know what companies parts they use just call Nicholas at LTA and he will give you all that information.

Teajay

I'm curious to hear from owners of this LTA Aero Dac, if any of you....

1.  Are using CD Transports?

2.  Which transports are you using and have you compared various transport with the Aero Dac?

3.  Which input connection have you been using with the Aero?  Have you noticed any difference in sound between the various input connections?

Thank you and best wishes to you,

Don

The LTA Aero arrived today.  Unfortunately, the Merason DAC 1 MkII has been held up in customs only two hours from me for a week now.

The LTA Aero was extremely well-packaged and super easy to set up.  It sounds good right out of the gate.  Very musical and in no way irritating.  I will give it some time before making more specific observations.

Stereophile review by HR was very positive too however Atkinson tested it and had issues wherein

..."The Linear Tube Audio Aero's measured performance is paradoxical. As I pointed out in my Richard Heyser Memorial lecture at the 131st Audio Engineering Society Convention in 2011, people tend to like the sound of nonoversampling DACs that dispense with the usual reconstruction filter, perhaps due to their accurate time-domain behavior. But the price paid for this benefit is the presence of a large number of aliased products in the audioband with high-level, high-frequency audio data. And although the Aero's distortion signature is dominated by the subjectively benign second harmonic, this probably won't be of concern, at least from the balanced outputs. I was puzzled by the fact that this harmonic was so much higher from the unbalanced outputs, though this discrepancy is mentioned in the Aero's specifications.—John Atkinson 

@mitch2 

Curious to hear your impressions after burn-in of both Merason and LTA. My CD transport is optimized for AES/EBU and sounds much better than SPDIF on my Merason Dac1 MKII. 

Wig