The A26 is very clean and clinical - however IMHO, the Denafrips Ares II sounds more holographic. It reproduces the felt space around the instruments and it has more depth than the A26.
Congrats on your purchase!!!! The Aeris appears to be the replacement for the Whispers as I believe they are now discontinued. I recently became a Whisper owner and hear the same things that you do, especially the depth of individual instruments in space. I don't think I'm going to upgrade...
As far as being superior...I don't know. If you're a PC nerd like myself, you will use it to your advantage. I actually have two pc's in my system...the first is my desktop and it's only function is to be the media server for my house hold (video and audio). The second is my NAS (network...
I have a large CD collection and I actually LOVE CD's!!!!! However I'm also a computer geek nerd. This is an advantage in the area of tech. People who love their transports/dac combos, turntables, reel-to-reels ....more power to them, they're great players. I just found that I can have the...
The only time I touch a CD now is to rip it. I'm not a streamer in the traditional sense (I leave that for my vehicles). However, my music cd's reside on a 20TB server. In jriver - I load everything into memory ... no glitches, no problems, no getting up either. Yes, I can listen to an entire...
No...the X16 it's a MQA (not interested in the MQA part) capable Dac with the ESS ES9068AS chip(x2) and the new OPA1612A opamps. This unit knocks it out of the park on the test bench and if I would describe its sound - Clear and very clean! Kinda like playing outside on a 93 degree day and...
However those very ears are flawed by age and other health factors. Causes me to wonder do any of us really hear the exact same thing? Maybe we need to present an audiologist report before our comments so people can get a gist of where we're at in our ability to perceive sonics?