Ok, interesting! I find the Diablo to definitely be clean and powerful sounding, but I like the tone and sense of space a lot, so it's interesting people hear it differently. It makes my headphones sing and not just planars - dynamics, too.
I never felt (heard that of the OG Diablo or the 2) for that matter, although I perceived the 2 to be a bit less on the "analog" side than the OG I think that almost all of our products steer towards the side of "old school analog" type sound that I dearly love!
Thank you for the answer but I'm currently interested in the Bifrost 2 SQ specifically in addition to having a relaxed dac, hence keeping a dedicated amp and dacs for flexibility, which was the reason I bought the IFI stack in the first place. Diablo's look and color aren't really appealing for me, and (apparently?) may not be fully balanced like the Signature v2 architecture.
You won’t find any other DAC with the same fast transients. It is immersive and engaging.
Let me rephrase my question. Can I install faster and or other flavourful expensive dacs alongside the Signature v2 amplifier without quality loss.
I have not heard the newest Schiit dacs but I owned several its dacs in the past. All schiit multibit dacs sounded compressed and sleepy on the long listening to my ears. It doesn’t matter if it is the gumby, the mumby or whatever versions (repeatedly I have not heard the Bifrost 2/64, Lim ..) all of them sounded worse than my Zen dac sig. I have not changed my Zen dac sig for 3 years unlike I did in previous years. Schiit ds dacs sounded ok compared to other brand I owned mostly because they didn’t sound glarey. So my recommendation here is you should go and try Schiit newest dacs (before Bifrost 2 era) and find if they suit your preference.
Suggestion - MHDT Labs, Istanbul NOS R-2R, D/A converter: Burr-Brown PCM61P-K.
Thank you for your recommendations.
