I had the Vega G2.1. As the G2.2 is so new, there are not many out there as of yet. My understanding is the G2.2 has improved processing power enabling more future developments than the previous iteration. I’m not sure how much of an upgrade it is sonically over the G2.1 - though I’m sure some.
I found the G2.1 to be a very nice Dac, but also had it fed by the Aries G2 and Sirius upsampling processor. In this configuration, the performance was quite high. The preamp and analogue volume control were fine, but I have a pretty high end integrated amp so I didn’t need that function. I tried it to see and it works well, but wasn’t at the same level as the one on my integrated. But, that isn’t a fair comparison.
As far as an all in one unit, it’s certainly competitive with anything else in its price range. Build quality is high and I like the native lightning DS operating system better than Lumin, BluOS and Aurender conductor. And, Lightning DS sounds significantly better than Roon (a common experience among many platforms as native software works well with the hardware it’s designed for while Roon, like Windows, has to operate on all kinds of platforms but may not be able to fully take advantage of the cache built into the hardware.) Please note that the Vega will not access local files on your network - it is a streamer only.
The upgrade path is nice - adding the Aries streamer improves performance (when used over lightning link) because they share resources. LL is the highest performing connection when feeding the Vega, but it can certainly use AES, s/pdif and USB.
In summary, I think most would be pleased with the unit. I compared the DAC against many others and found its sonics and feature set competitive, with a nice upgrade path
Hope this helps.
