Worlds best DAC

I have about 275 hours on the Perfect Wave DAC MKII upgrade. Don't know if it's the best in the world or not, but I suspect it can compete with anything out there on equal footing. I have never, ever heard digital this good anywhere.

the advantage of a tubed dac is the ability to alter the sound by changing the tube. sometimes one prefers more or less resolution, a warm sound, or other presentation. having a tube , especially in the gain stage has its benefits.

Arnie,

I was in the room with that dac while a friend was listening to something else by that distributor. I thought it was on static display. I wasn't aware that it was a contender. It looked nice as I recall. Do you know the price?

It was in the Musical Artisans room with Magico Q3 speakers and they were using Luxman mono block amps (not sure of the model) with all Argento Flow Master Reference cabling. They are working on an amplifier and that was in the room on static display.

It is definitely a contender as some of the best digital playback around (easily the best that I have ever heard). Its hard to know the exact price as the C1 dac/preamp has multiple options that you can choose - for example the async USB board is an option, as is the Ethernet board. I spoke to the founder of the company, Florian Cossey, while I was there and they are also working on an analog input board that he felt would be available sometime around June of this year. I think the base price of the C1 dac/preamp is in the $30K range. When I listened to it in my room, it sounded best when the C1 unit was used as both a Dac and preamp (it has both RCA and XLR analog outputs). It is also built like a tank - the C1 unit itself weighed around 70 pounds.

Arnie

Glad to see that the price has been kept low so that we may all enjoy it. Not!