codex versus the "DAVE"
I had one hour today with my Codex, a dealer's DAVE, my Focal Utopia, and my macbook pro computer full of cd quality music
the headset cable was the stock focal utopia's cord (unbalanced), the dave was fed the music via usb, the codex was fed via optical and all was done unbalanced
my experience is strictly a music lover with a long history of high end audio (30+ years and mostly high end equipment) no experience as a critic of any type so this is all in my own private opinion. just as I heard it today.
my experience listening to classical music was that the Dave had a very "polite" sound. There were no shrill treble sounds (even when I believe the music had them present) and drums were missing visceral impact. The low bass notes seemed to be missing the ~30 cycle impact that the codex had in spades. String quartets were smoother and sweeter on the dave but more fun to listen to on the codex.
On vocal tracks they were very close but again, the dave was not as engaging as the codex and it seemed to be less dynamic (remember I'm running the codex in unbalanced mode for this test)
rock and roll, country, blues, etc --- it was a toss up: they both had very similar information but the bass and treble were different and the sound was different: close but I still preferred the codex.
In conclusion (if a conclusion can be drawn from an hour's listening) for my source(apple lossless cd copies) and earphones(focal utopia with stock cables in unbalanced mode) the codex was a clear winner.
Not what I expected.
Jeff Fischman