What I find interesting, in a pejorative way, is here comes yet another $20K DAC. The pricing increases of home audio gear seems to track the rise in the age of the industry's baby boomer customer base. It certainly doesn't seem to track inflation or increased unit demand.
At least with the Aries Cerat you get a 100 lb. barbell set included...
Not a word about what is updated in the new version.
I would to have a look of the internal photos of this Ref Series 2.
When speaking to the Berkeley Audio Design team, they stress the importance of striving for neutrality with their components. They absolutely, to the best of their abilities, try to design out any sonic flavor. It's not in their ethos to color the sound or produce a sound some people may like. If you like neutrality, or no sonic signature, they build the components for you. To do this, they compare the sound reproduced through the Alpha DAC Reference Series 2, to the sound of the microphone feed at Keith Johnson's recordings for Reference Recordings and also use Keith's master recordings during the design process. These subjective comparisons serve to improve upon the objective measurements. When one reaches the limit of the best testing equipment available, one must have a sense for what neutrality "sounds" like. Given what I know and have heard, I'm willing to bet Berkeley Audio Design manufacturers some of the most neutral components ever produced.
(Note: Keith Johnson is a friend of the company, but not involved with the products in any way).
I'll take a guess... in my system thread, I compared the original Reference to my modded Alpha 1 - not a single difference, driven by the same Spectral transport, which is admittedly as optimized as they get. So I am willing to guess they improved the output section. Let's see how far off I am..
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