Welcome!
How's that SHD working out for you? (A very intriguing piece for anyone interested in room correction DSP.)
So far, so good. Very clean and neutral to my ears. The DAC sounds particularity good in my system. I haven't set up Dirac Live yet as I am thinking about new speakers and wanted to wait. If I decide to delay that purchase, I'll run Dirac set up and report back.
This system had some specific challenges. It iis a main room music/HT combined system in a 28x34' room with lots of hard surfaces and is at the limit of acoustic treatments available. I had grand visions of a nice tube pre-amp preserving an all analog pathway for my TT, but then realized I will have to run room correction to deal with acoustical challenges that cannot be otherwise addressed with treatments. Also, I wanted to simply an already complicated set up (less wires, more direct signal path, etc.). Accordingly, I found the SHD as one of the only solutions to the problem of a preamp/dac that also had a DSP/room correction and sufficient digital and analog inputs to work. This was the only unit I could find meeting those requirements, and it turned out to be a good choice for me. Sounds great (even pre-Dirac). I'm somewhere in the middle between subjectivist/objectivist when it comes to audio equipment, so the bench test reports influenced my decision as well.
