I'm thinking of Betteridge's Law of Headline's : "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
The interview is pretty interesting and they are certainly correct about the importance of power supplies with digital. I have yet to hear one of these systems in person, but my impression is that they do midrange really well for acoustic music, but bass, treble, and speed, not so well.
I remember 20 years ago I was really excited about how good SACDs sounded and my friend would reply "Actually I read that Red Book CDs can sound just as good or better!" When I heard Red Book in his system, it did not sound good or noteworthy. My sense has always been some people have a psychological attachment to the format that they invested in, even if it really isn't fantastic. Granted, the quality of the recording is always most important, and the DAC makes probably as much or more impact than the recording format.
I also remember all the discussions about why the earliest CDs sounded so bad. Maybe the converters were garbage and had phase distortion, the mastering engineers still thought they were working with vinyl, second generation tapes were used, etc. The big advantage of that era is the massive amount of dynamic range that was preserved and the lack of digital limiters.
After years working in the audio industry I found very few instances where 16/44.1 sounded better than the same source converted to 24 bit or DSD. The instances where it sounded better were with DACs that were noisy/measured poorly and benefited from not having as much dynamic range to deal with. Perhaps that is true for Audio Note.
I definitely respect the lengths they are willing to go to get away from "digital" sound. I used to think DSD was the best way to go, but some DSD converters are also very clinical, and maybe there are other ways. I also suspect that the route Audio Note goes in order to constitute digital sources in an analog flavor alters the sound significantly with distortions. People are willing to pay massive cash for their systems, so they must sound really good, at least for some tastes.
