Audio Research - DAC9

I am now at 85 hours on my DAC 9 and it is sounding amazing so far! I went from the Mark Levinson No360s which did 96k files from oh so many years ago and did them really well but the DAC 9 has so much more info in the midrange that its not comparable. The soundstage is deeper and extending outside my speakers like never before. The room just goes way now! Sounds more natural and just real.  I will say the bottom end of the Levinson was quite a bit better but dealer mentioned it would take until about 200 hours for the bottom end to really fill out. I am by no means saying the DAC 9 is lacking in the bottom end but that was one of the strengths of the Levinson product. I also have the PH 8 and to me the DAC 9 sounds very much like its in the same family as the PH 8 and I love Vinyl so that's a big deal to me and about the best way I can complement the DAC 9. There is one big issue right now if you use a Mac to play digital and want to play DSD files ... It doesn't work yet. They totally missed that in QA and I had a call with ARC directly and they are promising an update that will allow DSD playback using a Mac but for now it tops out at 192k on the Mac. You can use JRiver on a Windows machine and that plays up to DSDX2 just fine.