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Gorgeous!
yes! Ladder DACs are back! As they should be. And discrete ones -- are the best! This makes me think of the whole story about the original Philips lab hardware. They let many people listen to it and it was a hand tweaked bit of multi-million dollar hardware. They found it to be good. Then they tried to, overnight, reproduce it for $300 retail. No wonder we had turds for digital sound for the larger part of the past 20 years.
The only way for a product to succeed IS to bring it down in price for the masses. Look at HDTV price drops galore, and they are 8 times better than the original gen that was way over priced. Of course they need the BEST as a reference as they build products for the consumer, they seemed to have succeed, with the BILLIONS and BILLIONS of CD's and players that have been sold. So you want the million dollar sound at what price a million dollar$? Did you buy one? I didn't think so. But when scam companies put $300 CD players into packaging and call it $14,000 players, when they have the same OEM stuff in there, not just what the latest scam is with Lex+++++ but all the "high end" mfgs., selling glorified consumer stuff in overpriced packages. ABS brakes where millions in the first vehicles for test, over time due to mass production it's like $128 per vehicle now mfg cost, according to what I read by a VW guy. I bet ABS was many MILLION$ to develop. Same for cassettes to be developed earlier