A while back in the shoutbox I mentioned that I had tried the PWD mkii and it had sounded like trash to me. There was a weird fuzziness to everything and I felt like there was this "pressure" that congested the sound to the point that I felt like something was actually broken in the machine.

Well, I think I'm going to have to eat those words and chalk it up to something environmental or different inputs or whatever. I'm listening to the same dac now, and it's sounding way way better. That congestion isn't completely gone, but is significantly reduced and only noticeable after extended listening time. No changes to firmware (not sure which one it's on anyways).

The "bad" setup: being fed coax or optical from a Logitech Squeezebox Touch, and the machine was possibly still cold from outside (we're talking -30C here, even in a warmed car for a twenty minute drive, that's probably enough to drop it below ideal conditions). Filter 4 was the only one that I thought was "ok" but it was easy to pick out from the others.

The current "good" setup: fed from usb, (warm* outside and) machine has warmed up for a couple hours. Very very hard to tell the difference between filters now.
*still well below freezing, but that's balmy for Winnipeg

I don't know how much can be chalked up to the Squeezebox. I tried that feeding into a Yulong DA8 and thought it sounded great.

Rest of the chain is: laptop w/JRiver, amps are Nuforce HA-200 monoblocks, headphone is a modded HE-6.


If I had to nitpick anything about the sound (aside from the very slight congestion), the bass feels like it's missing some meat. Nice and defined though. Maybe I just like a tubbier sound. *shrug*. Treble has this very very slight hash to it, not a glare like some other dacs I've heard, just kinda like there's this fuzz on the leading edge of sharp sounds, really only noticeable with electronica.