Eastern Electric's new tube DAC using ESS Sabre??

I just got a new one last night and played it for a few hours. It is extremely nice, and definitely an increment over the SB Touch analog outs.
Art

Ask me again Sunday evening. Comparing the EE Dac to my Cary 308T is one of my primary tasks for this weekend.

And how momentous this is!
Do I need a cd player from now on for my high end sound?

Alas my wifi has been very flakey recently so.... it may not just be a matter of sonics.

Based purely on memory, I'd say the EE Dac (prior to break-in) is incredibly natural sounding with deep tight bass, a lot of detail and good authority. It is a little more neutral than my Cary 308T tubed cd player, and more detailed, but a tad more mechanical sounding or etched in the treble. That could be a function of break-in or just what you get with neutrality.

Yes, based on my experience so far, it is going to be a horse race, and that is a very high complement to the EE DAC indeed.

The EE DAC playing out of my SB Touch - getting signal via wifi from MacBook Pro, Apple Lossless - so far is in the same league as my Cary 308T. It has a slightly different mix of attributes and I'd probably say the Cary leads by a small margin to ME because I value coherence over detail and sound-staging. EE Dac sounds very natural. BTW i'm using tube output stage exclusively. I tried the SS output stage for around 90 seconds. SS output is very slightly less veiled and very slightly more mechanical.

Caution: EE DAC does seem very cable-sensitive.

I got so into it that I posted a review on 'gon.

See:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?rdgtl&1286673518&openusid&zzArtmaltman&4&&

Art

I will keep updating the review if there are changes. I lose track of all the other conversations.