Jarcher,
Have been living with CJ hd3 for couple week now and all I can say is "Wow". For all those time listening with HD3, I often though I was hearing my VPI turntable. Very warm and inviting. The older CJ sound very much like hd3. They both share intimate warm sexy midrange, wide soundstage. Where the hd3 better than the old one is it portrait a bigger sound, more texture and bass to die for. Also notice it is the most quite dac that I have heard. It is way better than my old Dac. I also compared several dacs in my system for the last couple months and I always come back to hd3 for red book format. Right now, I am listening to a borrowed dac - the NS Excelsio that retail $3000, while the Northstar dac sound wonderful with nice soundstage, coherent, natural midrange but I wish I could hear a bit more heavier Salena Jones's voice in "Easter parade" or a bit more punch in bass and more grunt in The Who-Tommy "Overture" like I used to hear when running HD3. I felt more analog with hd3 than with other dacs that been through my system recently.
Hi Austin : glad to hear you're enjoying your new CJ HD3 DAC so much. I've only read one real review which was pretty light on details, so nice to get some actual real first hand reporting.
Seems CJ these days may not be "fashionable" with their plain jane cosmetics and refusal of gratuitous bells and whistles, but they certainly do deliver on their "it just sounds right" motto. I suspect a lot of that great musicality and warmth you're hearing is due to their applying the same principles of simple circuit design with high quality parts to the analog section of that unit, same as they would with their well regarded preamps. I've often suspected that is as or more important than the DAC chip itself, which often is overly obsessed about.
In any case - enjoy and thanks for reporting back!
