I guess you must be a emm labs fan boy?
Read on, because here's where i reveal more technical issues with emm labs products...
The dac2x v1 replaced the xds1 v1.
And i still stand by my comments about the "whitish" sound of the xds1 v1.
However i noted the xds1 v2 had audibly improved from the v1.
I've had the chance to use the xds v2 extensively over a period of 3 weeks in a setup consisting of the yamaha ns-5000 driven by the pass xp20 and x350.8, a setup which is very similarly sounding to one of the system i have at home. The ns-5000 does indeed sound very identical tonally to my ss-M9ED. Their frequency response curves are nearly identical! And I'm using exactly the same pre-amp, nearly the same power-amp, all wired up by the same wires and powercords that were brought over from my home. That is why i can safely say that the xds1 v2 is much improved over its predecessor.
However superior the tsdx/dac2x v1 combo over their 1-box brother, they have 1 major flaw.
Long time audio asylum inmates will know i have a ritualistic procedure when playing optical discs - that is, i will shut down the player/transport & dac combo prior to playing any optical discs. I've developed a strict sequence of always powering up the transport first, insert disc, letting the transport read disc toc and settle, before i then go on to power up the dac. Music simply sounds better with this powering up sequence. However I encounter a very peculiar problem with the tsdx/dac2x v1 combo.
When they are both freshly powered up, and when i load in an RBCD, 9 out of 10 times, the dac will have momentarily sync drop off before locking on again. This has very audible degradation in sound. Luckily, with SACD discs, this was never a problem. And so with RBCD discs, sound quality can never be optimised on the tsdx/dac2x combo in my system. This was tolerated as RBCDs were only occasional fillers.
While using the xds1 v2 during that 3 weeks period, and playing RBCDs I didn't, and hadn't noticed this problem at all.
The question would be - was it the transport or the dac that is causing RBCDs to lose sync when they were freshly powered up?
All my testing and testing then led me to believe that the culprit had been the transport. So i dabbled with different optical disc transports for playing RBCDs for a while - including my sony scd-xa9000es (via toslink connection) and a shigaclone transport based on sanyo disc drive (using coaxial connection). Both transports allowed the dac to sync lock without any problem) Yes, i could enjoy very satisfying RBCD sound with very good sense of musical flow from these 2 transport that i couldn't get from the tsdx.
Now comes the surprise, and the shocker:
When i replaced the dac2x with the brand new v2 unit, i noticed immediately that sync lock with the tsdx when playing RBCDs were much improved! Where previously, success rate of sync lock was 1 out of 10 times, now it is 8 out of 10 times. Hurray! I thought i had gotten a winner here. It seems that the new v2 dac2x had improved on the sync lock issue where previously i thought the problem originated from the tsdx transport. However, i was to find out soon after that the v2 dac2x had a very different sound presentation from the v1 predecessor.... i don't like the new unit's sound!
Now, if given a choice of the TSDX/DAC2X v1 combo vs the XDS1 v2, which one should I go for?
I'll lose more money if I downgrade to xds1.
But in the long run, I think I'll have greater satisfaction.