Was sick home today while the wife and kid visited a museum so I got some quality time with the v2.

First, holy moly this thing is musical. There's tons more information and that fine detail that makes the better DACs so much more engaging is there in spades. I'm not kidding when I say this is among the best DACs I've had in my possession. It's not the Yggy, but I can stuff this in a bag and take it with me on vacation. With the Leckerton and UERM, I've got a rig that goes everywhere with me that sounds GOOD!

ZD,

these positive impressions, along with William-The-P  indicate a lot of promise for Geek Out V2 and V2+.
however both of you appear to run GOV2 as a DAC into another amp (most frequently).

can either of you differentiate on the Amp section of V2 vs. Leck, or there external IEM amps-
GOV2 Amp is 50/70/90% of other IEM amps or ?

hm when is Dr Cavalli IEM amp going to enter our lives?

thanks for stealing the V2.  ignore Casey when he asks for it back, send it to me.

For those of you with GO450s, I highly recommend you hang on to them until we can review the 3 gain units. Right now, my current v.2  prototype only does high gain (1000mw). Compared to the v.1 GO1000, it's an obvious improvement across the board. However, the v.1 450 still does some things better when used as a DAC only. Imaging, space and overall resolution are a bit cleaner and delineated. I suspect this is because of the 1000's is still putting out a little more distortion than when pumping out 450mw or 100mw. Where the v.2 1000 improves over the v.1 450 is more organic tone and timbre, more natural ease and musicality, cleaner macrodynamics and blacker background. So you could say these improvements reflect the changes included with the newer chip. The relative analog characteristics and differences between the 1000/720/450/100 still hold it seems to me.

Considering the 3-gain v.2 models will come at a price premium over the GO450 v.1s, I think there is possibly still a case for holding on to them.

The GO v.1s were kind of like this:

GO100-Cleanest of all the GO's, but macro dynamics were notably the softest and least involving.
GO450-The Reference model with the best resolution, imaging, space and air, best combo of clean and accurate macro-dynamic weight, etc., etc.
GO720-Sonics between 450 and 1000, but mostly shared character of the 1000.
GO1000-Biggest bass slam and punch, above neutral sounding, micro stuff and transients more noticeably blurred over compared to the 450.

Has anyone here tested the GO V1 or V2 prototype with a split USB cable and powered by a battery pack, an LPS or a good SMPS?
I am wondering how much better these USB DAC can sound with a "clean" power supply.

Concerning the rave reviews the GO V2 is gathering here, don't forget that LH Labs will have fine-tuned the prototypes to perfectly match all the components to get the best performance. The production units won't measure as good on average and are likely to feature inferior sound. It's exactly what happened when LH Labs first published the measurements on the Geek Pulse and later could show no improvement for the Geek Pulse Infinity despite heavy performance tweaking.

Not sure why you'd think the production units would not sound as good or even better than the prototype units we have in the field.  The measurements for the Geek Pulse Infinity we're an improvement over the Pulse Xfi, actually.  Feel free to check the LH Labs forums and research the measurements for yourself in the variety of threads that Larry has published them. 

Personally I prefer the GO without the Wyrd. I prefer the PS Audio PWD with a Wyrd.