Thank you for the excellent review. You've nudged me off the fence and I'll be sending in my order early next week to beat the price increase. Thank you, Frank, for the warning. I've cleared an advance on my allowance with my CFO.
I finally replaced the tubes in my FET valve preamp, and it made a huge difference. They were ten years old, but I hadn't been doing much listening since my power amp started acting flaky. I bought a used power amp, and had music again, so I listened, a lot. Then, sometimes the sound from the system would be horrible. I thought it might be a speaker, but it wasn't consistent. It was the tubes.
Now, for the first time, I can actually hear what people are complaining about when they complain about CD sound. I had been skeptical - not that it existed, but would an expensive piece of gear make that big of a difference? Or is it just something about CDs that make them sound not smooth or dynamic? Well, Frank didn't steer me wrong on the preamp (which I bought because my old Phase Linear died and I needed something.) It was by far the best improvement I'd heard. By letting the loud parts be loud, and the soft parts be soft, it un-compressed the music to a degree I'd never imagined possible from CDs.
So, I looked at the descriptions of the DACs and have been having this internal debate. Are they worth it? Well, the Ultra is probably out of my price range entirely, but I can swing the Insight. This review helped a lot. I was leaning toward getting a decent CD player next, but was struggling with whether all that money would make that much of an improvement. We'll try the DAC.
