A little more exploration shows that Ares II can't detect incoming power voltage on its own like its bigger siblings. Appropriate voltage needs to be set via switch on the bottom to avoid disastrous effects. It also doesn't provide an easy button to turn oversampling on/off like the models from Pontus on up. Now toggling oversampling requires multiple steps in the menu to make adjustment from recording to recording more challenging. All in all, Denafrips' decision and compromises to reduce price still place Ares II at the front of its peer group for build quality and features. The rest of this review will have to explore how those decisions impact sound quality; or not.

Moving up to Pontus takes the same basic recipe with some highly significant changes in critical spots, some of them trade secrets.

Going from Ares II to Pontus delivers the following upgrades:

• Pontus comes with a full aluminum chassis that is heavier and more inert as well as cosmetically more impressive.
• Pontus comes with an encapsulated, dual-transformer PSU that provides more filtering, more instantaneous power delivery and is a shielded from the rest of the circuitry by occupying the lower half of the chassis.
• The wider backside of Pontus allows additional input formats: I²S via HDMI, AES/EBU and dual AES/EBU, BNC all managed by proprietary code on FPGA.
• Getting into the finer details of the secret sauce, the R2R array is different but Denafrips won't disclose the nature of the differences.
• Likewise for upgraded DSP processing in the FPGA.
• As mentioned above, small convenience features such as automatic input voltage adjustment and an NOS/OS switch also become standard from Pontus on up.

What stays the same going from Ares II to Pontus:

• FPGA, USB receiver and AMR MUC hardware. Their programming differs however.
• The femto clock.