Yah I am quite unclear what he means. All that being said I actually took delivery of a VEGA G2 in Friday. So far I like it quite a bit. As a Roon endpoint setup and operation has been dead simple. It buffers quickly and does not drop anything.
The biggest thing I noticed though is the noise floor. With the Gumby connected to my amp via SE taps I could get the volume to about 55% on the amp before the noise floor become noticeable (with nothing playing) which was not a big deal as I could not turn the amp up past 25% without giving myself a headache. I always assumed this was EMI noise (as I have an input transformer would would prevent a ground loop) from the other electronics arround it, as most of my equipment is fully balanced. However using the G2 with the same cables, I can max out the amp and the G2s volume and still have a noise floor that I cannot hear, which is quite impressive.
Music itself sounds very resolving and there is slight improvement on spacial queues and a bit more detail retrieval. Bass is noticeably better both in quantity and in snap. While many described the G2 as slightly warm, it is much cooler then my Gumby in my opinion and I found myself feeling like there was something missing (the organic realism of the mid range), but once i figured out that it was caused by a cooler presentation, a quick swap of my rectifier made all the diffrence and I had all the things I liked about the Gumby with the bass and detail retrieval of the G2.
Build quality is grade A+, it’s the best built thing I have when it comes to fit and finish, better then any apple product, and unibody chassis if it’s size is very impressive.
Overall it’s not 4.5x better then the Gumby, but it’s probably 1.5 or 1.8 times better and that is about what I wanted (after all I am chasing that last 10%). I can’t speak for how it performs compared to others in its price, it’s the most expensive dac by far I have owned and listened to. What I will say is it is quite nice....and to be honest I am quite surprised by the lack of love this forum has given it. Personally my favorite feature is it’s fully passive volume control, I sit about 8ft from my headphone amp, and the fact that I can control the volume through the room app on the Vega G2 in the analog domain with no loss is a wonderful addition to my system and worth a sum of money (not sure how much but a bonus for sure. )
If there are other G2 owners, please chime in, curious what you think. If not maybe people can tell me why I don’t hear about them more as I am pretty impressed.
