First impressions of new MH-DA006, Musetec flagship

@melm 

Thank you for your comments

Both my Hegel H390 and Jay's transport are made in China and both can be repaired here in CA. 

@stuartk

My Subaru is made in Japan and can be repaired in the US. Subaru America is the importer and I bought from a Subaru deler.  That is how most foreign products work when purchased in the US. Hegel is like that, but But Musetec products are not.

The difference between Musetec and Hegel is that Hegel has an American company that does its distribution here. It is Hegel America Inc, in Fairfield Iowa. It’s a wholesaler. It imports the goods. It sells to dozens of dealers all over the country. Its American distributer/wholesaler and its dealers each tack on a profit to the price of the component. So like my Subaru, one can expect repairs to be made domestically. That’s what you’re paying for.

But when you buy a Musetec you are the importer of the goods directly from China either from the factory or from an "order-taker" like Schenzhen (which takes a relatively small mark-up). There is no profit increase as taken by American distributers and American dealers. Normally people, like those participating here, are willing to do that when they sense that they are getting a great deal more value for their money than by going the usual distributer-dealer profits mark-up route.

As ever, your money your choice.

I don’t know enough about Jay’s transport and how they do business and there is too little info on the ’net right now to figure it out.

@melm

I also happen to own a Suburu so your example is very apt.

I bought my Jay’s transport direct from Alvin Chee in Singapore. Repair work is provided by TEK Audio Specialties in Buda Texas. In fact, my remote needed repair and Todd at TEK fixed for me. I was grateful I didn’t have to ship it to Singapore but no doubt there are those for whom this is not a concern. Each to his/her own. 

I'm unaware of any repair needed to a Musetec dac, at least to 005, may have seen issues with 004, but then that was major platform for diy mods and some bricked them.

@dbb I recall your comparison to Holo. One thing that's critical to evaluating R2R dacs that many don't account for is clocking. R2R resistor arrays extremely sensitive to timing errors. USB generally not going to be optimal input, I2S the way to go as clock runs on separate leg. And then in order to reach max potential clock clocking should generally be done in streamer or renderer. The Harmony is the hot dac of the moment (reason I chose it) and I've seen reviews from both complete novices and seasoned reviewers, I've yet to see what I'd consider to be optimal setup in these reviews. I'll eventually purchase either Musician Phoenix or Denafrips Gaia DDC, run this with Audioquest Diamond HDMI (level playing field with my usb cable of choice) and set Harmony to lock to clock in these high end converters. Harmony has been both dismissed and claimed to be state of art or near state of art by various reviewers. Based on these reviews can't say if this all hype or ignorance, I'll try to place it in context by optimizing the entire setup. Going in I don't expect a $2700 R2R dac to be state of art or even near state of art. the amount of technology in this dac is nice value, not state of art.

Going into comparison, I admit bias for Sabre chip dacs, I fully expect even 005 to exceed Harmony in resolving/transparency, 006 even higher expectation. My take on R2R going in is nice sense of musicality, but boring in long run, perhaps even short run. R2R dacs nice forgiving sources that hide warts, Sabre dacs expose warts elsewhere in system, high resolving sources require system fine tuning. This why some claim Sabre chip dacs not musical.

@sns I appreciate your knowledge and insights. My experience now with the 006 confirms what you are saying on exposing the rest of the system. My Hegel P30 preamp may be too bright for the 006.  I will be experimenting with power cords too. It might have been just luck, but the 005 was just drop in. No system changes needed.