I was at Chris's house when we compared the ARC, BAT and Aesthetix and I can confirm that they were all very quiet. I never heard any noise or hum at all so I would venture to say they were silent, but I didn't stick my head in a speaker or anything:-).
As far as sonics went, I have to admit that the differences were seemingly minor given the hour or two we spent with each. If pushed I would say the ARC was the warmest of the three and had slightly fuller sounding bass, the Bat was the leanest and sounded a little less like tubes than the other two and the Aesthetix took the middle road. All three were extremely enjoyable and I would be happy to own any of them. My comments above are only to exxagerate the differences enough to give some idea of what I thought I heard, but I wouldn't want someone to think that BAT is lean or ARC warm. That would be misleading for sure.
I think all of us that were there were surprised to find ourselves struggling to come up with obvious differences. Chris's system is awesome and I would expect it to be very revealing of upstream components, so for all of us to be discussing their similarity more than the slight differences we could pick out I think speaks well of each design.
I think in the end if I had to choose from the three it would come down to features, user-friendliness, system compatibility and looks maybe, as I felt all of them performed very well.
Matt
As far as sonics went, I have to admit that the differences were seemingly minor given the hour or two we spent with each. If pushed I would say the ARC was the warmest of the three and had slightly fuller sounding bass, the Bat was the leanest and sounded a little less like tubes than the other two and the Aesthetix took the middle road. All three were extremely enjoyable and I would be happy to own any of them. My comments above are only to exxagerate the differences enough to give some idea of what I thought I heard, but I wouldn't want someone to think that BAT is lean or ARC warm. That would be misleading for sure.
I think all of us that were there were surprised to find ourselves struggling to come up with obvious differences. Chris's system is awesome and I would expect it to be very revealing of upstream components, so for all of us to be discussing their similarity more than the slight differences we could pick out I think speaks well of each design.
I think in the end if I had to choose from the three it would come down to features, user-friendliness, system compatibility and looks maybe, as I felt all of them performed very well.
Matt