Viscous: having a thick sticky consistency between solid and liquid; having a high viscosity. That basic definition matched my first sonic impression. Swirling oil in a cup differs from water. Oil is lazier. It lets go slower from the cup wall. So does honey dripping off a spoon. The final drop could hang a bit before detaching in a slow trail. Effect pegged, dilute it to avoid exaggeration. We understand the attraction of a more elastic less choppy mien particularly on elegiac solo piano. We hear liquid drops falling, not hard pebbles. We see the challenge of even minor stickiness when complex fare with many stacked overlapping sounds loses layer individuation. Separation goes down, reverb up. The overall gestalt gets softer, richer, bloomier so slightly oilier. More viscous. Core signature? To be sure, a CD went on endless repeat so thermal stability might replace any transit chill and related sonics.

In the meantime Vincent had an answer from Mr. Soren. "Our dam1941 volume control is fully digital with up to 55-bit math so precision is extreme. I call it a perfect digital volume control. The DAC section itself is 28-bit R2R. Even -60dB attenuation still maintains 16-bit precision." Vincent also had answers on mismatched display colors and remotes talking different code. "The display offset is due to OEM/in-house boards. The DAC uses Soekris' display board. The CDT3 display is Jay's. So is the CDT3-Mk3 remote. It's not compatible with the DAC's IR receiver. A firmware update isn't feasible. It's a hardware limitation." Sometimes reality bites. Some might say that we can't have everything. Relative to what our Benjamins buy us here, such sentiments are prickly. Let's get a life and continue.

Have you ever fallen in love with a tune thinking it by that artist only to later learn it's a cover? For you alas, it will always be the original. All other versions seem pretenders. That can also happen to sonics if we've tuned our system to coincide ideally with our notion of right. It's how imprinting works. It's why we remember mom's cooking. It's how I felt back with my original DAC. Suddenly separation, transparency and insight all shot back to familiar levels without given up any color coverage or image heft. I had to prevent myself from calling the DAC2-Mk3 lesser. Focus on just 'different'. All absolute sound is pure fiction after all. Jay's perspective was about the bigger picture. What personal preference heard as congestion or opacity during dense passages another will call more organic and naturalistic. That's because in live concerts, ears never get as close to performers as spot mics do in a studio. To the live perspective, extreme parsing and separation are audiophile FX; hyper realist. The live perspective accepts and looks for more blending and overlap imposed by distance and venue. That was the softer rounder Jay's DAC. My favored perspective is a more visual zoom. It's close up and direct in intensity and clarity. Physical setup with speakers a few meters off the front wall then creates desired depth. Subjective 'over there' remains, transient clarity and concomitant separation belong to more direct than reflected sound. The DAC2-MkIII staged just as far behind the speakers. Its difference was to also inject the minor blur/bloom of an indoor event's farther rows. It created that slightly fatter redolent impressionist signature. If sound were a chair, Jay's was plush, deep and with a reclining back to invite relaxation. Sonnet's was tautly sprung, its back upright to sit leaning forward. Adrenaline vs endorphins? Something along those lines.

A few weeks ago we refurbed two ~10-year old leather chairs. Their bright red from our Swiss residency no longer matched any of the present décor. I went for blue in my downstairs listening den. Ivette wanted deep violet for her upstairs studio. It took four coats of water-based special German leather paint. That's the kind of concentrated color coverage of Jay's DAC. Unlike the extra two coats of gloss I applied over my blue, the DAC's tone textures stayed more matte like Ivette's violet. Having reviewed a prior balanced Soekris DAC, I had a pointer even for the ghosts of 'all Sabre DACs sound alike'. Like their cables, the LessLoss Echo's End had felt extremely placid. I remember thinking that its tuning measures of strategic grit removal had also slacked a certain inner tension. The first time I'd come across such placidity was with a FirstWatt amp of zero voltage gain. Buckminster Fuller's word 'tensegrity' visualizes how certain structures rely on tension to stand erect. Remove their tension and such structures collapse. The DAC2-Mk3's more relaxed disposition via Pasithea came nowhere close to bleeding off enough musical tension for that. It was just a little cozier; hygge in Norwegian, gemütlich in German. That was Jay's special tuning. Superior hifi's main ingredient is always implementation. It controls how all the parameters interact. Nip here, something else tucks there. When it's all done, we hear the designer's sonic personality. Before you claim that surely the goal should be no personality, as long as people not machines design hifi, that's as impossible as having no plan is still a plan.

Putting myself into Jay's shoes to fill them with my personality, I'd say that he probably favors more tone density or color concentration to happily give up some energetic frisson or PRaT. I'd also say that he prefers 2nd to 3rd-order dominant THD and in fact a goodly dose thereof. Related lingo calls out triode not pentode, single-ended not push/pull. Where opposites attract, speaker mates might be from Børresen or Vivid. Where like desires alike for even more like, I'd think Boenicke. Still with my personality in Jay's shoes, I'd find his tuning more copacetic with simple tunes and sparse arrangements like ECM's Nordic Noir of Jan Garbarek than complex polyrhythmic workouts. If the whole R2R concept had you expect heavy emphasis on timing so high beat fidelity aka transient precision, you overlooked implementation. That's always the secret sauce especially when a web page calls out "boutique grade high-quality components were used for sound tuning/voicing". That goes beyond just perfect bench measurements. Since the above reads like Syndication Central for Denafrips' best, let's wait for my upstairs showdown against the Terminator +. Which deck contains more of this particular flavor? How do they diverge? But first, CDT3-Mk3 vs. Avatar for a high-level spin class, then an 80-min. playlist on my iMac/Audirvana source duplicated on CDR to compare cached/buffered PCfi to vintage real-time CD playback. Could pops throw shade on hi-tech millennials? Or would he pull a Lethal Weapon Murtaugh and mumble, I'm getting too old for this shit?