What's amazing is what Rob has said for years, if you chop off the transients it gets very hard to tell what the instrument is, Rob has said that over and over.
The importance of transients from perception/psychoacoustics POV has been in the text books for many decades. This isn't new - my small contribution is the realisation that interpolation filters muck up the timing of transients dynamically (that is transients sometimes being early sometimes being late) and that the ear/brain is hugely sensitive to these errors.
Any new info on the choral Mscaler? Still coming out this year?
No news on the delivery of the next prototypes. Problems getting parts, and the subcontractor delays in having staff to program and run the pick and place machines. Sadly it won't be this year.
I got worried when he kept mentioning 100k in the context of the Ultima Reference dac!
That wasn't in the context of the Ultima DAC, but in the pricing of other DACs. I don't know what the retail price will be - the design BOM is just performance driven, not on parts cost.
Luckily the R&D that goes into many “ultimate” projects filter down into more “affordable” gear ?
Absolutely. I can't forget things, not after all the time and effort that's gone into discovering things that turn out to be subjectively important.
Having said that, some of the things I have discovered require huge amounts of gates to implement - that means bigger FPGAs, which in turn will increase retail price.
Check this video out, talks about time domain.
@Rob Watts, I think this video talks about many of the things you say.
Great video - he talks about the importance of timing and transients for the perception of timbre. Of course, transients are also vital for sound-staging (left to right using the interaural delays) and perception of bass pitch, as the brain infers bass from transients, due to the limited number of hairs in the cochlea for bass pitch.
He talks about fixed delays, with sensitivity of transient timing to uS. But the problem we have with interpolation filters are the delays are program dependent and constantly changing - transients being either to early or too late. If it was just a uS problem, you would not be able to hear much of a difference from 100k taps WTA to 1M taps. My own listening tests suggests that any transient timing error, no matter how small, if it's a program dependent varying error, will be very much more audible - indeed any error, no matter how small, seems audible.
I have always thought that the audibility of transient timing errors was independent of age, and it's good to see that view supported too. Even with HF hearing loss, you still need perfect transient timing reconstruction to give the illusion of music sounding real.
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Don't worry i won't be offended. 
