Far more alike than not. It's what reviewers—well, this reviewer—claim when they can't really tell things apart. We just leave open a narrow crack for marginal differences. Perhaps T+ was a bit thicker, denser or warmer? If so, D10 plainly shared its more organic than hi-rez climate. Adding other triangulations to look back into the past at the original version, my best guess is that v2 shifted the more quicksilvery original COS signature into less virtual silver for more copper instead. If you're THD hip, think less 3rd more 2nd harmonic. With it the overall feel lingers more and pushes less. Call it a minor easing off like how a more mature slightly heavier man moves more deliberate. The same held for the XLR4 port into HifiMan Susvara. That incidentally retained ~20dB of untapped headroom when I flew at my usual SPL. Those expressed the same fuller more stately attitude to diverge from our resident Kinki and Enleum headamps. In short, the new €4.5K Taiwanese kept fulsome pace with the €6K PRC elder then added volume and high-level headfi.

The sub's forward location compensates for its 2.5ms digital latency. Disregard proper time alignment of subs and bake late-arriving bass into your finely tweaked system. Why would you?

For the more loaded Denafrips table to turn required clock-syncing the transport. That clearly notched up transient resolution. With it articulation, focus, contrast and separation all ticked up in lockstep. Given T+'s "integer upsampled" clock frequencies so not the 10MHz masterclock standard, it's the rare owner who can use the feature. The clock cables can be cheap Sommer types. The hard bit is coming up with a transport that sports the right clock input. Still, unfair advantages exist to be pressed. Being (cough) white, Western, male and with a good education so no doubt privileged, I did press the button called exploitation just because I could. Isn't that always the excuse? Now the Terminator Plus took the lead. Defeating its clock outputs, v2 pulled virtually even again. Sometimes it's really this simple. Ditto the value implication. Having established v2's general sonic playground, the next sessions moved downstairs into the big system.

With the original COS D1 in residence since its review, confirmation was served on the earlier guess. I had my day in audio court. What to swear on when the judge asks for the truth and nothing but? The Abso!ute Sound? Before it came to sacrilege, I explained that v2 does look at the same scenery with more fleshiness and color intensity. I invoked Lumin's P1. v2 now struck a similarly fetching balance between raw detail and presenting it elegantly arranged. It's the core question. Do we pick speed or mass, transparency or density? By then the judge had dozed off. My day as expert witness was over. With this next system of higher resolution than upstairs, injecting some extra gravity didn't eat into lucidity to any objectionable extent.

Even complex stuff like "Noah's Dream" from that other—but sadly departed—Swiss electric harpist remained happily intelligible. The many percussive hand-flesh hits pinged left and right with realistic vigor and smack. The bass growled, the vocalist gargled, the harp shimmered all inside an enormous space bubble well behind the Aurai Lieutenant speakers. Yes Cees Ruijtenberg's Pasithea had the edge on microdynamics and ultimate separation but the COS didn't veer too much off its path.

Curiously enough, I convinced myself that the COS sounded its best at full gain so +6.0 on its speedometer. Number fetish. I naturally had to cut that again with my autoformer passive. Did sending higher voltage down six meters of interconnect simply incur less loss? I've been at this far too long to worry over fancy—or just fanciful?—explanations. Whatever gets the job done best has my vote. I needn't understand the inner mechanics at work. Leave that to the engineers paid the big bucks. I just saw Stephen wince. Despite today's aggravated assault on parts/shipping costs, v2 sells for exactly what v1 did. That drains someone's wallet, just not the consumer's. Even Amazon just then had levied a 5% fuel & inflation surcharge against its sellers.