Steve,
I was trying to be careful about saying I liked the Proton over the Havana, as they are quite different from one another. I was trying to make the point that async makes a real difference and there were enough interesting things with the Proton running as direct async that I really liked, and why I wanted one of the better, tube output wavelength dacs. The Havana being a NOS dac with tube output does sound smoother and more tonally righ than the proton, but the Havana has a lot of time on it, and the Proton is only a few weeks old and most of the owners so far say that this thing can take 4 or 5 months to really hit it's peak. You've got only 2 volts and zilch for current running through a large 1200 volt mundorf cap, so naturally it will take some time to fully settle in. A lot of folks are confused about the "starts at $900" statement, but the fact is, that there are no options and $900 is the price. Hope that helps somewhat.
I'm looking forward to the comparison too, but the Havana and Legato are packed up and ready to head off to their new owner, so I will have to go by the unreliable auditory memory. I'm guessing that there will be some things that will stand out pretty noticeably once I get the Cosecant in the system.
The Havana is no slouch of a dac, but the direct async usb connection just has to be experienced to be understood. The Legato brings a lot of that to the Havana though, and would probably do more if the Havana's spdif connections were a little more direct -- the incoming signal goes through a switch and a relay before going to the dac chip. The switch for switching between toslink and coax, and I presume the relay is to switch over to the output of the USB decoder when the usb cable is plugged directly into it.
-- Jim
