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Cool. Let us know if you like it.
At this point in time I think the Concero is actually quite under-hyped for what it offers for the money.
Your right, hype probably isn't the right word. There's not a whole lot of people talking about this but the few that have, have highly praised it. It's one of those things that's very easy to pre-judge on appearance and completely pass over. I am guilty of this myself sometimes.
I remember reading something awhile ago about the Concero briefly and thinking "Stripped down DAC based on core of Invictus, this could be interesting" Upon further investigation, I saw ES9023, USB bus powered, consisting of only a few chips, and I immediately categorized this as an overpriced entry DAC trying to capitalize on the Resonessance name and Invictus reputation. All this of course without hearing it myself or even taking the time to read any impressions. I only made my way to this thread from a mention on the Nuwave thread.
Clearly, my prejudices are mistaken. I'm guessing the Concero must contain very high quality clocks and lean heavily on the FPGA. I suspect the FPGA probably costs more than the DAC chip itself. Not to mention, I think I remember reading the the Resonessence team consists of the same engineers who designed the Sabre DACs to begin with so I'm sure they know the ins and outs of it very well and how to optimally implement it for best performance.
The overall implementation reminds me of the Wadia 121 I briefly owned. The Wadia uses the Sabre ES9018 and an Altera Cyclone FPGA to implement their own proprietary upsampling algorithms as well. The end result sounded much better than the sum of it's modest parts. Unfortunately the user interface frustrated me to no end and it had to part ways.
One comparison I'm curious about is with the Audiolab M-DAC. It's another Sabre DAC with selectable filters and alot of tweak happy options. It also has a "de-jittered" SPDIF output, though I suspect the Concero is probably better in this respect. I don't think the M-DAC uses a separate DSP chip, at least that I know of. Based on descriptions of both I read, I think I'd still prefer the Concero sound quality slightly. Since the Wadia, I've become a big fan of quality signal pre processing with a good DSP chip.