By now it was sadly far too late to claim that DHL had left the package by the front door which a poxy porch pirate duly absconded with. That fib is on actual hifi record. Really absconded with was the strange habit of certain designers whose attenuators traverse ~30dB beyond mute before first sounds peek out from above our room's ambient noise. That wastes far too many steps. Particularly when a device resets itself to zero with each power cycle, it means infuriatingly clicking through 30 increments before anything audible happens at all. Mario promptly put paid to such pedantry. His attenuator starts to make very faint sound already at the first step. Hurray. That's real-world engineering with the client in mind. Truly, I couldn't find anything to bitch or even niggle about. Time to retire? Okay, so I really don't fancy black hifi. I much prefer silver or white. Mario only does anthracite. In a fashion that's ideal. For me it puts the Ultra Plus out of bounds. My accountant is happy. C'est la vie.

In our main rig, Polish Qualio IQ speakers behave openly baffled above 600Hz—their 6" SB Acoustic papyrus-cone Satori mid runs as non-filtered widebander up to 15kHz whilst gently overlapping with the Mundorf AMT—to deliberately activate more of a room's ambient field. That naturally benefits tone but softens transient percussiveness which instead would benefit from drier direct radiators like the upstairs 4" Mark Audio Alpair widebanders back-loaded by an invisible isobaric mate. Hence the Ultra Plus' peppery popping elements of the first showing shifted deeper into timbral effulgence. Projection power softened slightly but presence stayed put. So did dynamic scaling though again, transient fettle was less fierce. This properly reflected different transducer MO and room coupling. On the score of sonic spectacle, upstairs had been even more whoa. On the score of tonal saturation, downstairs would have visitors predictably point out the pencil-prick bottles with an "of course, tubes" comment. They'd not account for the dipole contribution nor explain how ordinary 6922 not big-tone 6SN7 manage to such an extent.

We're back at admitting ignorance over which paralleled output device does what exactly in the final summation. I'm reminded of wire wranglers who parallel silver and copper strands in specific ratios. Suffice to say that the Venetian packed still juicier tone than our usual Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe which reformats all PCM to DSD1'024 on the fly; and a visiting Nagra Classic DAC II which resamples all to DSD256. Mario's onboard ESS DAC had no issue processing a few new native DSD128 files; nor of course any PCM file from my library which Audirvana Studio's embedded SoX up/resampler reformatted to 2 x DSD. After confirming that then given personal preferences, I reverted to Audirvana's power-of-2 PCM upsampler. That meant either 352.8 or 384kHz. The colour intensity of this second system recalled my earlier vision of the ruddy-faced athlete mid workout. Her circulation and breathing work in high RPM to exude that flushed aura of vitality and can-do. Exactly this exuding business was part of the deck's projection and presence. Dynamic gush was the other half. One feels intuitively compelled to point at Mario's overkill power supply and shrug it off with a blasé "of course". But one still has to design such a stack successfully, then figure out how to package all required parts in such close proximity without causing noise contamination; and/or end up with bizarre cosmetics.

To my eyes the ZeroUno Ultra Plus looks perfectly formed. It nods at classic all-valve kit then packs modern menu conveniences and an atypical hybrid circuit. Now you have my first impressions from that initial period of greatest friction when what we're used to is still firmly to mind to rub up strong against any challenger's differences. A few days later we're already acclimated. The difference window begins to close. Come a week later, it's shut tight and the status quo reversed. Now one wonders. Will any initial 'aha' turn 'bah'? Eventually we return to our own hardware reference—the word merely means our familiar comparator—to see whether now rubbing in the opposite direction shifts our first assessment. To get to that point takes more time. Right then and in a nonchalant way, it seemed fair to say that the ZeroUno Ultra Plus pushed the analogue side of D/A conversion to what in our digs were new heights. The ESS digital side did exactly what we'd expect relative to so-called detail and resolution.