So the D10 piles on features but in its base version where it mirrors the D1 still halves the price. Mechanically, the housing morphs from solid aluminium for the D1 to a two-layer structure of inner steel hull with front/back partition for digital and analog all disguised behind sand-blasted thin aluminium dress panels.

The white Oled display with large readout of volume, input, sample rate and signal lock gets a resolution upgrade. The D1's metal remote control stays. Packaging scales up to a custom flight case.

It felt predestined.

With the D10, COS Engineering open many new doors to increase their global footprint. Making add-on modules user-fittable sans dealer intervention or return to Taiwan is smart. It also saves coin for those who don't want these features or mean to build out their deck in stages as finances recover. Black and silver skins add more choices.

Here we see the slide-in streamer module…

… followed by the slide-in phono board.

Then comes the unit fully loaded.

Without any listening yet, things already added up for this new beast from the East. It packs a dream team of can-do under one smartly styled hood without visible fasteners or frills. By November 2nd, "finally all of us on the team are unanimously happy with the sound. I used to think that quantity was more difficult than quality but obviously that's wrong. Beauty can't be quantified. The sound can get better but never perfect so we must stop somewhere. We already started assembly of the first batch and have four units that have been tortured for some time with the unavoidable scratches that entails. They need no further break-in." Having to do no scratching of my own, I wanted one of those four. Done. Regular Polish contributor Dawid Grzyb would get his own unit for HifiKnights. Done². It's just that neither of us do vinyl to test the phono module. So perhaps not squared, just triangulated? I also don't do streamers. Our music iMac can already access Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify directly with a proper 27" retina display. It needs no wifi tablet to do it, just a web browser. A premium external reclocker cleans up the USB transmission just like an 'audiophile' server would do. I'd thus review the D10 as a 3-in-1 of DAC, preamp and headphone amp. That's the standard $4'500 package. Dawid's system uses a Japanese streamer. That made him a more likely explorer of the D10's streaming module. For full 5-in-1 coverage, Stephen Gong would need other writers.