Eastern Electric's new tube DAC using ESS Sabre??

Paulsax... I agree with you on the relative value of specs, but were you to compare a device with say 129dB of dynamic range to one <100 dB, the result would be most startlingly apparent, all other things being equal, of course.

I too own the EE DAC and I think NJS describes it pretty well. It's nicely made and its presentation is detailed and dynamic; it responds pretty well to tube rolling too.

The other day I compared it to the Cary Xciter DAC, and these are different animals. In my set up, the midrange and upper midrange of the Cary is fleshier, which makes the EE seem a bit recessed in the mids--of course, I am not sure I would have said that before the A/B. The EE is more detailed and "faster" sounding.

I like them both, they're just different.

I am feeding these FLAC files fed by a Logitech Touch. Neither the Touch/EE nor the Touch/Cary sound as good to me as my Cary 303/300 CD player, but they're not too far off.

Bob

Bob, How does the Cary 303/300 sound as a transport to the EE DAC as compared to Touch?

Good question. Remarkably, I am sorry to say, I never compared them. My pathetic excuse is that at the time I was swapping amps and preamps and sources and cables and... oh my.

If I ever have them together in the same rig again, I'll be sure to do that.

My reason for asking is that when I compared my CD transport to my Logitech networked source through the EE DAC, the CDP clearly produced superior sound (to my ear).