I think I have to second Tim's opinion that the clock upgrade gives more immediacy, like the singers aren't trying to play hide and seek behind other instruments. I have always thought my dac9mk3 had a lingering decay and a little hazy high freq precision to it, so I upgraded from pmd-100 to dsp-1 module. I still noticed a little bit of fuzziness even though it did become more neutral, and suspected it was due to the psu of the dac9mk3 being different from the psu in the ref 1. But upsampling to 96khz with the new clock noticeably improves high freq presence, speed, maybe timbre, and adds smoothness and continuity. Violins really dance, many instruments sound fuller and more continuous, the energy in music seems captured, but I get the impression that it might be OVERALL a little more colored even though I think the high freqs are certainly more accurate and clear now.
This is with only 15 hours of burn in, but from what I think I hear, you may want to hold on purchasing a DI with the current clock, I think there's a good chance audio-gd will be giving the new clock the thumbs up.
One more strange observation
, the first hour or two of use I couldn't help shake the feeling that I was getting a similar positioning as from a single-box mp3 player or something with transport and dac in the same box connected with I2S, namely immediacy of notes and firm instrument positioning. I have no idea what conclusion I should draw from this observation
, right now I'm leaning to the theory that spdif needs a lot of touching up to compare to I2S, but I don't know enough to be sure.
