The new dCS Varese DAC...it is so good that all others are now relegated to history??

@brite61 I’m pleased that you still like the SQ of your dCS Vivaldi. However, the new dCS Varese is priced at multiples of your Vivaldi, and with the speed that digital advances, it strikes me as a platform that will need upgrading in the not very distant future. I’m sure dCS will offer upgrades for the Varese ( to a point), but at what price?

My main point is this: is it wise to be buying the SOTA digital anything at very high cost, when it might make a lot more sense to buy yesterday’s model...and at a considerable discount, since this can usually be accomplished in very short time?

You may have received 80% of your investment into your Scarlati ( sounds like you were lucky), but I know plenty of folk who bought into the better digital offerings, only to receive 30-40% of their investment after a very short amount of time.

OTOH, if you are one of the folk who has to have the best, and don’t care about the cost ( there are a few folk like this in this hobby, more than most of us realize, perhaps) --- then you are one of the consumers that dCS is interested in.

$250,000. That's a quarter of a million! Should we only decide what to purchase with excess money in the audio world? Wait. Who am I talking to? Who is DCS talking to? If somebody wanted to show me their system and it had a $250,000 digital front end, I think I'd want to walk out the front door. It's a disgusting amount of money to spend on a digital front end. I don't care how good it sounds or how rich you are, if you don't have people in your life who could use some of that money, well, talking about stereos is beside the point. You need a life.  

@audio-b-dog 

That sounds a little judgy. 

No...

It is a judgement. When I go out and buy what I call expensive equipment, I judge myself. I don't have an audio budget, it all comes out of the common fund which includes wife, daughter, grandaughters. In the review, Michael Framer pronounced the quarter-of-a million-dollar wonder as good as analogue. You can buy a good turntable for ten to twenty grand. I guess at some point I see certain price points in audio as just too much. When I was growing up, my mother said, "Eat your beans. People are starving in China." (A very long time ago.) I'm sure that my friends judge me all the time for the "moderate" amount I spend on audio. My new speakers were $18K and I was gulping at that. Sorry for judging, but I do from time to time judge our hobby.