I hadn't seen this almost two-year-old company before, but was familiar with founders Andreas Koch, formerly with Studer ReVox and EMM labs, and Jonathan Tinn through his relationship with darTZeel. Sharing a room with darTZeel, Playback's MPS-5 was sitting in the center equipment rack spinning discs.
The MPS-5 plays both SACDs and CDs as well as accepting digital signals from music servers and the like. Retailing for $15,000, the transport is based on a modified Esoteric mechanism, and inputs on the back include AES, SPDIF, Toslink and USB (up to 48kHz).
I don't like to judge sound under show conditions, but this room sounded
wonderful. And the company motto is pretty clever too: "Ear Responsible".
