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I rather thought our man too modest. But first things first. In with the 19V/3.95A SMPS brick's 5.5/2.5mm plug. This unit is built by Chinese OEM supplier Astec. It's the same as this Toshiba laptop charger and lacks a power light. Wall link was a 3-pole clover-leaf cord. Into the scooped Klutz saddle went the first sealed headphone from Audeze. Now the Gemini 2000 began with the same source is boss talk the Scots at Linn had once plied like cheap gin. Why? Because in one corner stood the Conductor's muscular linear power supply and more potent all-discrete output stage. On power and cachet it meant to be the superior amplification. If analog was king, bigger and discrete had to be better. True or false? In the other corner stood the small challenger from Hong Kong. It casually proposed that more advanced D/A conversion could trump bigger amp muscle. I barely lit up three of its five volume LEDs before my ears gave out. The Gemini had plenty of moxy for the Audeze LCD-XC which I reviewed here for John Darko's site.
44K x 8 = incoming 352.8kHz, 48K x 8 = 384kHz
If sound quality matched up, the beefy Down Underling wanted $1'850 to bill the stand portion of the Gemini 2000 at $150 extra. Then even naysayers shouldn't have a real problem. Obviously the Conductor has more i/o. It doubles as a preamp. The Gemini only does headfi. Here it even lacks the otherwise ubiquitous S/PDIF coax. But eliminate the HE-6 and stick with Xuanqian's design brief. That means advanced USB audio and portable data processing from a digitally docked iDevice, direct-connected Android, Toslink'd Astell&Kern or memory card. Now the 2000 is far more than hollow style exercise. On sound for pound it really does compete fair and square.

Astell&Kern via glass-fiber Toslink; iMac Redbook upsampled to 352.8kHz in PureMusic, here a ripped Jazz Piano CD sent to me by reader Ze'ev Mehler, of his son Elan Mehler's trio with 'Being there, here' on Challenge Records
As Xuanqian had predicted, on my Windows XP Pro machine and despite my prior Vega install, I had to rerun his driver to add the new device. On my music iMac it was plug & play as usual. As had my band of ESS brothers before (Vega and Conductor), the Gemini 2000 proved allergic to the optical S/PDIF output of Cambridge Audio's iD100 iPod dock. It stuttered and dropped out. Pure's i20 played nice. So much for ESS's alleged immunity to high-jitter data. Optical off my RWA-modified Astell&Kern AK100 was peaches of course as was USB at all sampling rates including DSD64/128. Ditto for dumping my Munich 2014 playlist to memory card and playing from that. After the data dump the card showed up as a separate drive and opening it accessed its music files. Unmounting and ejecting the card from the Gemini showed it to have gotten quite toasty after just 10 minutes.
iTunes playlist at left, memory card list at right, memory card icon upper right corner, its drive icon below highlighted in yellow

The point count. In my world juxtaposing quality gear matched on price usually has one deck come ahead on just points. Bloodied knock-outs are mostly for Marvel Comics super heroes. More often hifi comparos are actually sideways business with a split jury. And here's how the Gemini/Conductor bout clocked out. Take the fistful of qualities which break down into airiness (treble effulgence, sparkle), tone gloss, color depth and audible space (reflections, performer halos, your sense of keen spatial context around the notes). This whole package was better handled by the AURALiC as though its converter's zoom power was higher and sharper.

Light Harmonic LightSpeed USB, AudioQuest Diamond Toslink, Zu Event power on Burson
There's another grouping of traits. This connects overall damping, punch and slam in the bass and a broadscale sense of grip or control. Here Burson's higher power had the upper hand. As loads grow more dastardly, the Conductor hits harder. With my relatively easy loads however, the hi-Ω Sennheiser 800 most certainly included, there was a flip side. Over the Gemini those exhibited more dance. Think elasticity and suppleness in general and also how an acoustic upright can be made to sing like a cello on steroids. Cue Renaud Garcia-Fons. This bella voce quality renders instrumentals a bit like vocals. Though bowed or fingered, they act as though carried on breath. Fluid. For the fundamentally percussive piano, Chopin is the archetype of fluid. Whatever you call that quality—flow, gush, looseness, ease, temporal freedom—the Gemini had it. By contrast the Burson played it drier. More 'matter of fact'. In headphone terms the Conductor represented an AKG K-702. It's neutral, very workmanlike, hard to fault objectively but subjectively not as persuasive. The Gemini injected greater life and sheen. More buoyancy. Sennheiser's top can. The redolence of an Audeze without the darkness.

For this audio judge then the match favored the AURALiC which won on points. The sole area where that went retrograde had nothing to do with sound. Xuanqian's ribbed volume wheel does it counter-clockwise for louder. It's so against the grain of convention that it'll take a while to sink in and stick. Finger prints on the shiny base will sink in and stick far quicker. Keep a little chamois cloth handy to maintain the luxurious lustre. The finish really is spectacular.
  
AURALiC's Aries introduced Lightning Streaming at CES 2014. Based on a quad-core 1GHz CPU with 1GB on-chip RAM and 25'000mips speed, it's 25 x faster than their prior Sanctuary chip co-developed with Swiss Archwave. Lightning supports multi-room 24/384 DXD and DSD128 WiFi transmissions between NAS and DAC at up to 1300Mbps. AURALIC's Tesla software is the tablet-based user interface. Aries drives its AES/EBU, coax and Toslink outputs with a Femto clock and actively buffers its USB host. Clearly AURALiC are about innovation. The Gemini twins are just one example thereof. Convenience hides high technology.


So write off the Gemini 2000 at your own loss. Not only is it integration done right, at two class A watts it's got enough power to drive nearly all headphones made. For the same coin you could go separates. But why? In my book it'd only be different, not better. That being so, why tolerate more cables, cords and clutter? in this light the smartly lacquered Klutz-licensed headphone stand is actually mostly free. And who'd in their right mind refuse such a pretty freebie?
With beyerdynamic T5p and custom ALO Audio leash
Whoever your favorite deities might be—I'm partial to the Hindu god Ganesha and Tibet's Tara—we owe thanks. It's as simple as that. To the naysayers I'll say that dumb blond jokes are so lame. There's no decent reason why looks and smarts couldn't coexist. In audio that's thrice true. Here things aren't a roll of the genetic dice. Reject, refine and repeat until perfect are the name of our game. There's zero justification when things we're to enjoy and handle on a daily basis don't look beautiful. That goes for tea pots, bath towels and your favorite chair. And hifi particularly when it's so up close and personal as headfi. The Genesis 2000 says amen to that and follows with a blessing. With all of that it really does have the last word (though I suspect that for most it'll really be the half-priced 1000 model that'll take the cake)!
 
AURALiC website