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Conclusion at a glance. I couldn't tell the La Voce loaner apart from my Metrum Hex. I needed a Valinum and heavily leafed copy of The Absurd Sound to regain my bearings. Bad joke aside, I got to this realization by wiring up both to my two-box battery-power SOtM USB bridge (dX-USB HD with super-clock upgrade + mBPS-d2). This avoided having to reset sources in PureMusic and relaunch it. To that locked the Hex via AES/EBU (van den Hul) and the La Voce via BNC (Tombo Trøn). Both connected to my usual Nagra Jazz preamp. Its remote switched so seamlessly between inputs that a very minor cough would have disguised this sleight of hand for a golden-eared audience who'd have been clueless. End of review? Only if you mean to revisit the Hex text. To make sense of the Voce's core quality requires a brief detour into time/phase-coherent speakers. As an absolutist design dogma it's practiced by only the very few. Think Vandersteen, pre Mason-era Thiel Audio and Green Mountain Audio for three quick brands. There are more but it's a small list. From this shortage we can extrapolate that this design ethos resonates not with the shopping majority. Otherwise 1st-order would dominate. It doesn't. It's just a blip. (As with anything else, there are good and bad 1st-order designs. Membership doesn't guarantee quality.)

To some listeners though anything but a 1st-order speaker sounds subtly off: nervous, choppy, vaguely irritating, not quite right even if it can prove vexingly elusive to clearly pinpoint a hard reason. Here we are not talking about theoretical merits and demerits of engineering choices. This is about individual psychoacoustics and brain chemistry. Some seem aurally prewired for a special sensitivity to such time coherence. Others have trained themselves to notice it and no longer un-notice it to get satisfaction from anything else. Like religion this can't be argued. You either believe or you don't. Is you is or is you ain't? Enter non-oversampling filter-less D/A converters. They too are in the grave minority. They too suffer very rational attacks from the engineering chairs about why they're a bad idea. And like our endangered but resilient species of 1st-order time-aligned loudspeakers, they're going nowhere soon but seem here to stay. Which by implication means that if you're not prewired or trained to key into this NOS thing, it'll pass you right by as well. You could feel most befuddled indeed by what all the fuss is about. There's nothing anyone can do about that. Désolé.

Owning both the Hex and a maximally upsampling AURALiC Vega, I can relate. On color intensity, retina-display sheen and subtle sweetness the Vega beats the Hex even to my ears. Yet the former is on my desktop streaming 320kbps Spotify+ for constant new music discoveries; or converts AIFF files from my iPod. The latter plays in the main system. What the Hex does better or different is more important to me. Having laboured over describing it already many times, here are the fruits of those labors. The 'zero-sampling' thing is first and foremost about flow and rhythmic ease. If you follow hifi measurements, you're familiar with frequency response, phase-vs-frequency, distortion and waterfall plots. None of those apply. The only conventional measurement that would seem to have any bearing at all on our case today is the impulse response. Track how convoluted poor impulse response charts accompany highly enthusiastic speaker reviews. We're back to where we started. Most listeners seem inured to the charms of the time domain which an impulse response plot tracks for speakers. (With digital there also are the pre/post ringing plots.)

To grossly exaggerate for effect, proper timing is the difference between a swing band and a marching band. If that image communicates, you've nailed down the essence pat. Now tone it down to be appropriate. Think of better terms to describe the effect. You'll probably arrive at things like fluid/rigid, gushing/controlled, loose/taut and various derivatives thereof. That's it; subtle but real. The second effect I hear from both NOS DACs and time-tweaked speakers has to do with soundstage sorting. It strips out a subtle blur. Vagueness becomes certainty, ambiguous image scaling shrinks and locks down to proper size, the depth domain opens up fully and audible space as an acoustic other than your own descends fully. Such better timing can also reduce or eliminate 'warmth' or 'mass' which in this context actually stem from small imprecisions and ghosting. Again, that's it. Nothing drastic but still noticeable.

I've heard vintage-chip NOS DACs that were soft on top. AMR's master mode 2 corrects for it. Zanden Audio's original implementation I reviewed and owned did not. Both Hex and La Voce seem to incorporate their own 'correction' or don't suffer this artifact in the first place. Otherwise I have nothing to report on for the frequency response, tonal balance or any of the other usual suspects of hifi discourse. Nothing stood out as less or more than appropriate other than this very familiar rightness which I know so well from my Metrum reference. It's simply not appropriate to turn rightness into righteousness. Live and let live.

Wrap. Whilst the La Voce strikes me as somewhat less unique than its maker would seem to claim, that not only takes nothing away, it justly reinforces that its design decisions and concomitant performance flavor are quite rare. Where at least to my mind it gets really interesting is with that most mundane aspect of it all: price. At €2'180 and being very well put together save for its perfectly functional but ringy bent sheet-metal cover, the La Voce S2 from Italy pursues the Audio Note, AMR, Metrum, Zanden & Co. type sound for a lot less than most. With Italian not offshore manufacture, that's twice interesting. Add circuit modularity and hot-swappable converter boards for in-situ voicing. It really is a wonderful overall package that has me wonder. What type of posh challengers might the tube/Mosfet hybrid hotrodded version for twice the coin take on? As is, the La Voce is a perfect stand-in for the well-liked Dutch Metrum Hex. If I wasn't already behexed, this Aquarius—six planets not moons at that—would go the Aqua route. Being my virginal encounter with this company, I thought it a terrific first blind date with a very happy ending!
Playlist with one selected track per album.
PS: To assuage concerns or insinuations that Aqua's onboard USB transceiver was somehow below par because I used the SOtM bridge for my main comparisons, that was for source switching convenience. I also compared Metrum and La Voce with their own USB ports. Same name, same game. Why there should be a performance advantage for an offboard USB bridge—with the SOtM there is for both converters—I don't know. I'm simply not alone to say so. What with the extra cabling and circuitry involved, it's counter-intuitive to say the least. For this review let it suffice that Aqua's solution is fully competitive with the popular M2Tech OEM module inside the Metrum Hex and elsewhere.
Aqua Hifi website