I had the great honor and pleasure to listen to the Aphrodite in single-ended mode with @christoph and our new friend Martin st Christoph and Moni’s place last Sunday, in his his wonderful system with the great Amplifon SET42SE and hORNS Universum (replacing the Horizon 360). It’ll come as no surprise to report the Aphrodite is the finest sounding Lampizator DAC I’ve heard. What was surprising to me was that the main attributes were ones I tend to associate with an amplifier or preamplifier upgrade: greater density, palpability, physical presence and weight (mind you: without sound bass-heavier, colored or bloated, rather more energized in every way, true of triangle as much as a bass drum). There are lesser DACs with similar resolution but that present music and a soundstage like a hologram one keeps wishing were more filled-in. That’s what it does. As a result, large scale recordings such as Hérold-Lanchbéry’s La Fille Mal Gardée or Ansermet’s Royal Ballet Gala (legendary Decca recordings by Kenneth E. Wilkinson) profited even more than the already impressive playback of jazz, rock and pop songs we listened to, partly because there’s no sag, no “pumping action” of soundstage, no collapse during or after orchestral tuttis. We ended up using Lukasz’s presets of “016N” (Modulator 1, Filter 6, negative phase), which sound firmer and less resonant, free from “tubey-sounding” emphasis on e.g. the midrange (presumably less aliasing and thus less “halo”). If I have any criticisms whatsoever, these would be that a) I love the look of the pixies on the more well-proportioned Horizon, the backlighting on the remote is only useful if one knows the function of all the buttons by heart (at which point no backlight seems necessary), and the main one: when I first started listening with Christoph (the usual Mani Matter song to check on phase and polarity), irritated by what I heard, I made my poor buddy climb behind the system to unplug, invert and replug the Schuko power cable twice before noticing he’d set the phase to “P” (positive) as I’ll bet any new owner would who hasn’t read the manual in intricate detail. The Aphrodite is an inverting design, hence the standard setting, correctly, is “N” (negative). No doubt logical, but counterintuitive.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.
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