Cambridge Audio are a great company, employ and hire some fabulous engineers and have been making people happy for 50+ years.
Personally, I think with @dancingsea 's views on most recordings he should get a Devialet Reactor 900. I’ve been listening to mine most of the weekend, it’s really enjoyable, levels out most recordings, goes really loud and is portable.
Having sold his audio system, he can then go to lots more live concerts, which is what music is all about. He may have to wait 6 months, and I am painfully reminded every time I am in my office as our music calendar is firmly stuck in March. At least there is a nice picture of a duck to look at.
There are a few harsh realities:
- Even at it’s very best, home audio is only a pale imitation of the real thing.
- The DSD DAC when reviewed was not particularly resolving. In fact when reviewed by Stereophile it did not resolve better than CD quality. I’ve not seen any reviews of the DSJ or any more recent DSD DAC reviews, as magazines are not going to bother with reviewing software upgrades.
- Ted is first snd foremost a software engineer. People seem to like the DSD and DSJ DAC’s because they sound more analogue. That’s a PSA house style, hence the Analog Cell. However, analogue is about warmth, not resolution. The best analogue is I think equivalent to about 14 bits or resolution.
- I have tried DSD. I used an Audiolab MDAC+, a very good DAC that cost me £650 new compared to the DSD I considered at £6,000 and actually measures better. The best news is that I sold the MDAC+ to a guy in Germany for £700 because I did not like DSD. I tried a few recordings and the problem one was Shostakovich Symphony No 2, Liverpool Philharmonic under Petrenko, the opening was impossibly quiet and I then got blasted. And I have have speakers that are extremely good with low level sound. It had too much dynamic range and frankly needed to be compressed. It might work for people with 100% insulated music rooms, but not in my house.
- DSD sources and DSD upsampling seem to me to be different things. DSD upsampling is a software thing and may improve the sound from 16/44 recordings.
- It is very rare in my experience to play a recording that the sound, as opposed to the music, is unpleasant. The most common is with piano depending on where the microphones are positioned and the amount of room included in the recording. I like close, but not too close.
- I listen quite a lot with a $70 Zorloo ESS 9018 inline DAC, in high resolution streaming Qobuz from my phone via the usb audio pro app that bypasses the phone’s DAC, into MrSpeakers Aeon headphones. This $70 DAC is more than sufficient to tell between good and not-so-good recordings.