[sendler2112]

Playing the VMV D2R DAC into the VMV P2 and the amp section of the Burson Conductor Reference SE for comparison, The VMV amp sounds better. It is slightly wider and slightly warmer in the range just above vocals. But even with this slightly more fleshed and easier midrange it can still hold an edge in retrieving the last bit of resolution of reverberant tails farther down and out. And bass extension and weight is improved. Some of this seems to be due to running the headphone cable from the 4 pin XLR balanced of the P2, whereas the Burson is only single ended and I'm using a short adapter on the end of my headphone cable to take the 4 pin to 6.35 TRS.

Playing the P2 out the SE jack is around 6db lower in gain and probably only half the power and starts to sound more like what I am hearing from the Burson but still not as bright around the HiFiMan 8k resonance peak. And using the RCA input to the P2 lops off another 6db. Which definitely forces you to bump up to the mid gain level. Which is fortunately only a very slight degradation to the sound compared to low gain. The difference in sound quality between high and low gain of the Burson or the Aune S17 is quite a loss when selecting high.


Since the P2 can accept XLR and the Burson SE only takes RCA input I could connect them both to the D2R at the same time, match levels, and just quickly switch the headphone cable back and forth. It was interesting to find, but not a surprise that with the output of the D2R set to "all", the sound was thicker and less detailed due to the extra impedance of the double load. It is nice to have option to turn on only one or the other.

The HifiMan HE1000SE are an amazing reviewers tool. So transparent and revealing.

 

[sendler2112]

The last thing I wanted to play with on the VMV D2R was to see if there was any difference in the sound between the variable and fixed output selections. When I tried this on my Burson Conductor 3XP, the difference was fairly substantial with the fixed setting sounding immediately more detailed and open. The D2R is much more subtle but the fixed does sound slightly more detailed and transparent than when switching to the variable setting, even before dialing in any level cut and matching the volume with the amp. Just going from -0.0 fixed, to -0.0 variable makes a slight change in the resolution.

That being said the variable still sounds good even with -6.0 matched so anyone using the VMV D2R as a volume control can use it for that much fine control and be happy with it.

Switching my amp to "mid" gain and taking the variable down toward a listening level matched -18.0, you can hear the quality starting to go away already. Even with 24/192 files. So analog volume control of the amp will still be better if you are using more reduction than this.

 

[sendler2112]

My comparison of the D2R to my Gustard A26:

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/gus...pressions-thread.966041/page-63#post-18084774