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It depends on whether the LKS is stock or modified.
The 004 is almost 3 years old now and the competition (Denafrips, Gustard, Holo etc) have closed the gap and I think the stock performance is pretty ordinary today.
LKS has not done anything in that time and has been cost cutting eg the XO regulator went from 1A to 200mA, effectively shutting the door on drop in low cost OCXOs replacements from Abracon.
The price cuts on the LKS004 we see now should not come as a surprise.
In that time, Denafrips released 2 versions of the ARES and the ARES2 NOS mode means HQPlayer can now do the heavy computational lifting. I am less concerned with the conversion technology provided DSD is properly supported. It is on the ARES 2.
DSD's SDM modulation has many advantages on paper, unfortunately I have not heard a chip or FPGA based implementation that I liked, in many cases being much worse than PCM
HQPlayer brings a substantial increase in computational power to the table in the form of CPU+GPU, the transformation is night and day.
Moving the DSP filter and upsampling processing to the PC produced such large improvements in sound quality, it made the hardware mods (XO, cap swaps, voltage regulators etc) seem like small incremental changes.
I agreed on many counts, FPGA is noisy and still very limited in development for audiophile based. Even Chord is using a customized FPGA which is developed by others....Delta-Sigma is perfect on paper but there are still too many limitations to bring out and about the precision’s of Digital music to improve the performances....phase timing noises/errors....capacitors piezoelectric effects....resistors tolerances.....etc....it isn’t easy to bring about the optimal performances of the modern Delta-sigma Chips.
Yes, HQplayer is excellent since with a great built-pc, you can have it do Delta-sigma modulation on the fly...However, Offline processing would be even better, since the program, the CPU can take as long as they need to optimize the modulations of Oversampling processing. This is why I value the next HQplayer4Pro which allows offline Sigma-delta processing and store it into a MicroSD. Nowadays, MicroSD is 1Tb, so storage should not be any issues any longer.... even with DSD512
not to mention that different Delta-Sigma modulators would bring about different sounds....and good thing is that HQplayer4Pro has many
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