The finale was a toss-up because one of the two finalists did not survive the finish line. The winning design was by Periklis Gurdouparis from Greece. It had very cheap Chinese D/A-chips and lots of tubes in it. The following day, Bruno Putzeys of uCD/Philips spoke about making audio measurements using DACs. He had three of them. One was last evening's winner, the second a non-oversampling design and the third his own brainchild. The shoot-out winner measured fairly decently, showing a typical distribution of distortion components from a tubed output stage. The non-oversampling DAC was more wanting in this respect but Putzeys didn't condemn such designs entirely. His own DAC measured essentially perfect - the measurement values were as good as they can be in practice. Interestingly, Putzeys was rather pessimistic about his DAC's possible success in a shootout like the one organized the evening before. The reason was that tubes are so euphonic. If nothing else but sound matters, tubes are hard to beat, said Putzeys. That's from probably the most knowledgeable man on Class D amps on the planet.

For the sake of impartiality, I have added a few images of the turntables present at the ETF 06. And finally, many thanks to Guido and Emile for arranging an excellent festival in the spirit of the past traditions. I can’t wait to see what the plans are for the 2007 festival.