That included Dhafer Youssef's soaring vocals from this unexpected source. It's a compilation album honoring flamenco royalty Paco de Lucía, here with oud replacing the typical guitar and the Tunisian's otherworldly head voice traditional cante jondo.

Whenever one deals with amps powerful enough to benchpress Susvara yet which lack a low-gain provision, it's only fair to wonder. How will they do on self noise with the opposite sex of super-sensitive cans? Final's Sonorous X are 105dB at 16Ω. Whilst such specs depend on how they're referenced, ~50 rather than ~15 on the dial told its own story. Final's dynamic flagship was "35 x louder" than HifiMan's planar king. Yet even pumped up on +6dB steroids—a level where you'd blow up these 'phones and your ears, the only unknown being which first—I heard positively zero hum. At max gain, the amp might as well have been off to these noise sniffers. That was fabulous S/NR and a real feather in the engineering cap of team COS, the connoisseurs of sound. There's no good reason to pursue a powerful amp just to drive ultra-efficient headphones. But D10 buyers focusing on its digital, streaming and phono chops without having equivalent headfi ambitions can rest assured that even more pedestrian mobile-approved cans will safely plug in without throwing a hissy fit on background noise.

Ultimately of course, the D10 is a properly posh player. It deserves high-end not lo-fi loads. So far, this machine had revealed a number of surprises which deserve an equally masterful track filled with superlative soloists under a seriously chilled conductor in no need of any efforts. The link will request you to watch it directly on YouTube. Do. It's well worth your while. And stay for the encore.

Our readable encore goes to the D10 as DAC/pre versus the D1. Both got signal from our USB bridge, the former by I²S, the latter by Chris Sommovigo Tombo Trøn coax. Their volume controlled the system. This simplified our usual setup of fixed DAC into separate preamp by one box and $17'000+. Which is precisely the proposition the D10 makes. Chuck your costly preamp. Don't get one in the first place. Ouch?

With 200-watt monos, 91dB speakers and normal SPL—here normal is contingent on age, sex (women tend to prefer lower levels than men), neighbors, room size, sitting distance and personal sensitivity to loudness—~30 on the dial did the needful for 2020's Andreas Vollenweider release. The headphone outputs remained live so I pulled those cables. By implication, inserting them doesn't mute the line outs. Whilst I prefer the D10's sleeker leaner font, the D10's fat/bold readout and size for its volume numerals was certainly nicely legible from the seat even to aging eyes. Seeing our two rebels with a COS stacked one atop the other underlined how hard their team must have worked to duplicate established cosmetics whilst chasing a 50% price cut.

With levels matched and only RCA cables to reseat—the iMac kept outputting uninterrupted USB to the Soundaware which supplied both machines with constant parallel signal—I had a rare experience. Only one performance parameter changed. That was fully isolated from all others. Hello girth. Over the D10, performers dropped a few pounds. With the D1, they regained them. It was bizarre to do this mid tune: to hit pause, redo a set of cables, undo pause and watch weight come on then off in an instant. Prevailing wisdom claims that a camera adds ten pounds. If you want to appear trim on film or a magazine cover, aim for being ten pounds lighter than you hope to look. These repeat A/B felt like that. With the D1, I had the camera's added body. With the D10, things were leaner but not as a function of tonal balance shifts. That's what made it different. The closest parallel I can think of is the effect of a beefier power supply. If so, that aspect favored the flagship to perhaps give it continued relevance.

Because nothing else happened, I didn't really view it as a better/worse change, just a sideways move. With much expanded functionality for half the green, that was a major win for the D10. How about going upstairs against the Denafrips Terminator? The Chinese runs fixed gain so I'd use Pál Nagy's icOn 4Pro SE autoformer passive behind both to control volume. For the occasion, the D10's would sit at +0.0. Both would share exactly the absolutely minuscule sonic influence of the passive to isolate their respective converter/output stages.