I can't give much a critique since I don't consider myself the expert head-fier yet, but I can share a bit of my experience with it so far, and more importantly some pictures which seem to have been lacking... so here we go:
When I started down the Head-Fi rabbithole ("Welcome to
Head-
Fi and sorry about your wallet") I thought it would be all about the most accurate experience, but since I have reminded myself it's really for my enjoyment, and I like old-fashioned stuff and very much tubes... I love my Valhalla and have something with a bit more oomph coming my way. In the meantime, the DAC I was really looking for seemed still far off in terms of availability, and I came across this DAC with ~Tube inside~.
It seemed a bit of a long shot (hadn't heard of Maverick Audio, some issues with the D1...) but what the hey. I got the pre-order with the extra tube. Shipping and customer support was good, the only small issue was the lack of shipping notification, so I found the missed delivery notice after contacting Ryan about the order status...
It DID arrive straight from the Shanghai Carpet Factory (seriously!) which was a bit unusual to say the least... talk about diversified. It also smelled strongly of fresh paint (?) and had what seemed like a thin brown film all over it. Cleaning it on the outside with alcohol and letting burn-in (literally) take care of the inside after a couple of days, it's been running like a champ since. The build quality is OK, without the screws the cover is a bit warped, and the source selector knob is not running true and scraping the front panel a bit. Since I almost never use it (always on optical) and the actual switching is via relay, no biggie. And in light of the D1 issues I read about: the relay is the only clicking sound, I have not ever heard anything in the actual audio, neither between tracks or switching sampling frequencies.
On to the inside (tried to upload a larger image for more detail):
And a closeup (I believe these may be the solidstate opamps?):
Overall, I have had it running now most of the time I have to listen to anything these days and it has really grown on me. On the tube output mostly since that's why I got it in the first place, but plugging/unplugging with the standard output, I have honestly not heard -that- much of a difference. Time permitting, this weekend I'll try to hook both outputs and my other DAC(s) up to an RCA switch and finally try to find out how much of a difference it really makes (to my ears anyway...)
