That's too bad. Pricing the Femto at parity with DACs like the Meitner and the Pandora may have been a mistake.

Empirical will be showing the Overdrive at RMAF with fully maxxed out Vapor Sound Cirrus monitors (blacks I think, not the new Accuton based Cirrus white). The sound should be awesome. Vapor is going nuts with new speakers, like 5 of them all at once.

Never compared them side to side, but I did have the newest version on loan for a couple weeks.  It is a very good DAC, but there was a hint of that digital glare that I don't really know how to describe, and I chiefly use USB these days and don't think you need two boxes to do it properly these days.  The current Alpha is really keeping up its value though.

USB is down to remarkably low jitter as is.  The Femto claims to obviously be in the Femtoseconds, as is the MSB analog DAC. 


The Invicta used to have just two filters, and now has a whole host of filters that compete with those of the Bricasti M1.


I'm personally a believer in the source sounding neutral and accurate and doing any mucking about at the amp or transducer stage.  I heard a Lampizator for instance, and it just didn't even get a chance because of how much it colored the sound.


The DAC wars will continue mostly on the computer front, with better FGPA, better SD chips, better USB receivers, etc.  The thing is that almost none of these companies (save a couple) use anything other than currently available parts made by big companies.  So they all have the same bottlenecks more or less, and will all reach the next level of performance only as new parts and technologies become available through others.


There's always room for innovation though - for instance, Wavelength was way ahead of the game with Rankin's asynch tech.

That's true, and why I decided to stick in the price range I did.


A headphone setup could use 100% of my Cantata's potential, but only 60% of a K-01.  I did the math and it would use only about 20% of the potential of a dCs Vivaldi stack. 


Considering diminishing returns, the K-01 only gives you 10% above the Cantata, and the Vivaldi gives you maybe the extra 5% above that.  Except since we're using headphones, the extra 100K only brings us up 20% of 15%, for a net gain of 3% in sound quality at a cost of $110,000.  I'd rather spend that money on a better camera to take sharper pictures of my watch and car to post online.

Hopefully we get better low-jitter USB implementations as time goes on.  It's a shame that the Alpha needs a quality USB converter to sound its best, and I think that's probably colored some Alpha impressions.  Another interesting thing is changing between filters 1.1 and 2.1 on the Alpha, as the people who've heard my Alpha are pretty split down the middle on which filter they like more.

It'll be interesting to see how the DAC wars continue.  I personally prefer the Wolfson over the Saber32, as the Saber32 implementations I've heard sound a little etched.

What I find distressing is that many manufacturers are still not paying attention to USB power and grounding. The USB input on the hyper expensive EMM DAC2X is not isolated, just like the Meitner DAC. Use it with a laptop and a switch mode power supply and all of that garbage will go straight into the DAC. IMO if you're asking $1,000 or more, your USB circuitry should be self powered and isolated. Period.