This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below Driving Miss Definitely. With the v2.08 driver installed nothing changed. Everything worked just as it had without the driver. As per Georgi, "the point is to ensure compatibility with all Mac devices for guaranteed stability and sound quality which without the driver cannot be guaranteed for all variations of Mac hardware and software. Our driver allows us to sync the source to our clock whilst Apple's native driver does not. In some systems this will translate as a sound quality difference." 'Dirty' DSD tracks. Geoffrey Armstrong: "My comparisons were made with the latest Rethm Saadhana driven by NCore monos with the Platinum as preamp. Obviously this is an extremely revealing system. I felt that upping to 256 made the older recordings more modern sounding. I threw in some modern tracks as well for comparison. Since DSD tends to sound more analogue, people into DSD may be less inclined to flavor with tubes than those mainly into PCM. On the DSD side folks into classical are obviously quite well served by labels like Channel Classics and Pentatone. Given a DAC with the Platinum's capabilities they will have to ask themselves whether they want the PCM or DSD version of a given recording." No sow's ear silk purse. After importing Geoff's deliberately shorter tracks through Dropbox into my iTunes library, I could duplicate some of his experiments on my end. Good grief. Bad DSD sounded just as muffled and choked as poor compressed Redbook. Trite but true. What wins isn't format but recording quality. Steer manure by any other name is still bull shit. That shouldn't imply that physical rips of SACD are inherently compromised. My use of 'dirty' merely pointed out that just as with PCM there are superior and very poor examples of the recording arts. Here we had a few deliberately bad ones to see whether and how much they could be improved. I'd reviewed Geoff's actual 100dB Saadhana pair before its final delivery to Monaco. I also was familiar with Ncore 1200 from the Acoustic Imagery Atsah monos. I knew exactly how his rig's acoustic microscope function beat my own on dynamic reflexes, midband lucidity and S/N ratio. On my end I fully expected less difference between DSD64 and upsampling to DSD256. Still, 'twas a unique learning opportunity. Perhaps now upsampling would telegraph more than it had on my polished DSD demo tracks? On Santana's drum track with Cuban-style vocals, DSD256 injected a bit of air/space and improved transient crispness on the conga strikes. The prime address was treble-centric but some of it bled into my midband perception whilst the murky guitar chords proved beyond salvation. Fritz Reiner's Zarathustra fanfare sounded most dated and compressed either way. 256 did turn it a tad glossier, probably what Geoff called "more modern". By confining good bandwidth to a single instrument, Vijay Iyer's solo piano was quite instructive. Upsampling did nothing to his left-handed registers yet on right-handed meanders into the upper octaves there again was a bit more sheen, brilliance and wetness. The Stones' "Country Honk" sounded mostly identical. On classical tracks the main benefit was of more air and space. The prime upsampling benefit I thus heard acted like an upper-octave moisturizer. Think audio version of the ultrasonic humidifiers/atomizers we use during the winter months to combat excessive dryness from high in-door heating. My walk down DSD256 aisle hadn't remotely seen any transformative data. Turds won't polish. Yet even on a more tone than ultra-rez system—audible also over Audeze LCD-XC headphones—these first steps into upshifting DSD's ultrasonic noise like PCM aliasing noise to exploit gentler filters with reduced HF phase shift do look promising. If DSD downloads grow beyond narrow audiophile appeal, it's likely that a few years hence upsampling them to ever higher rates will be commonplace. For now the Zodiac Platinum shows that way. exaSound's e28 already plays native DSD256 at up to 8 channels but I'm unclear whether it upsamples 2.82 and 5.64 to 12.28MHz. Even if it does, we're clearly still in the very infancy of this development.