Some people seem to think that dCS gear gives you the absolute technical performance in digital reproduction in the form of accurately converted data. But dCS gear is in its best form an artistic tool, and admits the "analogue" element as much as the technical precision. I once heard a demonstrator take a Joni Mitchell recording with embellished chords (Joni's alternate guitar tunings!), a flowing melody, an organic groove, and warm room acoustics, and show how too little a wordlength and too short a sample rate can spoil the playback of a recording like this. "Yes dCS gear has purely technical strengths," it was implied, "but remember that music is one of the fine arts--the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult to reproduce--and that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note, its vital pulse ruined by a single mechanical beat" and the dCS Delius/Purcell DAC/upsampler really seemed to capture most of the PRAT (pace, rhythm and timing) of Joni Mitchell's music that day, and impressed me as never before. But what I am saying here is more suggestive than argumentative: I wonder if it would be possible to combine the Audiomeca Mephisto II transport with the dCS DAC/upsampling gear to see if they can make the most of each other's strengths, since there are so many similar "analogue" merits in each of these products.
