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estreeter, I'd love to hear some thoughts on the MS2 if it's not too much trouble.
Tough one, as considerably more golden ears than mine have listened to it and pronounced the MSII 'audiophile bargain of the century'. As one of the reviewers noted, its hard not to become an evangelist for this inexpensive little DAC, so let me play Devil's Advocate and point out the things I am less enthused with:
1. The form factor and the color, particularly the red on the base model, means that it is very unlikely to fit into anyone's AV rack - it will stand out worse than a PS3, although I admit that its a lot easier to hide.
2. RCA-out instead of line-out. This will seem petty, and I guess only headphone enthusiasts would even want it to be the latter, but it annoys me nonetheless
3. Unlike the DAC/amps I've owned to date, the MSII can be a pain in the butt - you have to go into your sound applet and unmute the thing, then set the sample rate/bit depth from the operating system, and that is a dance that I believe you should only have to do once. Not so with either Win7 or Linux in my experience - happy to hear otherwise
4. I initially had small 'skips' in playback under Foobar 2K, but followed the advice given by another owner and changed a key setting in F2K to '120ms' - instant improvement.
Little niggles aside, I had read a great deal about how well the MSII 'smooths' the rough edges in your music, particularly compressed music, and that has definitely been my experience. Plugging my iBasso D4 directly into my netbook was far from ideal, but the MSII has made the whole experience a lot more coherent and 'civilised'. Whether that suits your personal taste is a question I cant answer.
The first thing I noticed was how the increased clarity of percussion on a lot of my metal collection - individual strikes on the drum skins instead of the mishmash you get with onboard sound from the headphone out into the D4. Bass is also tighter and more enjoyable, but
the best change has been the taming of the highs - whether those with more laidback headphones would notice this is a tough question, but with Grados its very welcome indeed. I dont feel that I have lost any detail, and acoustic female vocal from someone like Tracey Chapman is glorious, even if I'm not conscious of any changes to the D4's soundstage. Generally speaking, it lines up with the 'dense, warm, organic' description I stole from another reviewer (after he had stolen it from the original reviewer ..), and it would be very interesting to hear this sub-$200 DAC paired with a more expensive amp, and I'd especially like to hear it in a speaker rig.
Like anything where the hype factor has been inflated to gargantuan proportions, the danger with the current range of Streamers is that someone will inevitably expect $2000 worth of improvement for $200 - that simply isn't going to happen - but with
lossless music, a decent amp/headphone pairing and a week or two run-in, I would expect it to put a smile on most folks faces, jaded audiophile types notwithstanding. I found classical particularly enjoyable with my modest rig, but it was the improvements to my metal that really sold me on the MSII.
Hope this helps,
estreeter
