Hello Jazdoc,
I am excited and fortunate to have the Aria WV5 XL in my possession. A landmark product like the WV will take 1-2 weeks minimum to get a handle on its performance.
When we put a component into our system, and something is immediately wrong, we know it. Truncated decays, flat presentation, severe problems with tonal coherency, etc., and out it goes immediately. But 5 minutes into listening to a new product and our mind is spinning out of control from hearing a level of refinement we never heard before, and we thought what we owned already was at the top-level of performance, well, we know we are in for a long-haul of evaluations. This is the WV. Seven hours for the first night was only the beginning.
There is much to evaluate here: the line stage vs. others, the phono stage vs. others, with or without the step-up transformers for MC, tube rolling in these two stages, etc. I am dead-tired of cable swapping so I will not even bother with this; the Dream State Dream Catcher PC and Jade Hybrid ICs will be left alone.
I have not written much on A'gon since the Gabriel Gold cables thread. It's a lot of work to write a review on such a landmark product as the WV. I tried this with the Aesthetix Io and Callisto Signature vs. the CAT Ultimate II over a year ago and I put a lot of hours to share my observations. So much playing with cables and tubes, night after night, it can go on and on.
When I read a Roy Gregory, Michael Fremer or Jonathan Valin multi-paged review of a top product, I can appreciate the significant amount of time they took to report their findings. And rather than spending all the time for that, I'd rather be up all night to enjoy the new level of performance the music now has in my home. But I am sure that I will have much to share by the end of the month. Most likely it will be with a handful of friends via email and then we'll see if I want to put forth the effort to document it all here.
John
