Has anyone heard the PS Direct stream mk2?

One thing we know is that it is louder so that HAS to make it sound better, right?

Yep, I have one and am currently enjoying it a lot. I think with the current trade in value, it makes a lot of sense for someone who likes the mk1. If you want to try something entirely different though, there are plenty of other ways to spend your money.

driftingbunnies- your last sentence kind of sums it up- for $8k ish, there are lots of options.  

You don't have to trade your Mk I in before you receive the Mk II.  You have thirty days to send one of them back to either complete or void the trade.  So a chance to compare head to head.  Before you see any independent reviews the trade in offer will be long gone.  There are multiple people on the PS forum who have compared the Mk II to a bone standard Mk I and various modded versions and all claim the Mk II is clearly better than even the "full modded" Mk I.  Several of those are people whose ears I trust and if I needed another DAC wouldn't hesitate to try it as I own a modded Mk I.

Looks like there is less than one hour left to do the trade in. Hurry! lol-

My MKII will be here in a couple of weeks, but I don’t have a MKI on hand to compare. I’ll just have to go from memory. My MKI was not modded. I used the Bridge II card with an EtheRegen and got really good results. I’ve read the MKII has already been compared with the Tambaqui and sounded better, and equaled a $14.5K dac I forgot.

The thing I like about what PS/Ted Smith is doing is the generous trade in (my MKI started life as a Perfectwave, then upgraded with DS kit) and how they evolve via OS updates. I liked hearing the MKI evolve from the first release to the final one. It was a fun ride and was free to hear. PFGAs create a new circuit inside a sea of gates, so it sort of is a new machine every time they update.

With the MKII, Ted revealed via youtube video he isn’t even using the second FPGA yet. He has some ideas about using one for L, the other for R, or different FPGA’s for different functions.

The unit already is being said to sound fantastic, and who knows where Ted’s experiments may lead in the coming years.

All the things he learned over the years of developing new OS for the mkI, he implemented in the hardware of the MKII, which also has much better transformers than the MKI.

Also the ability to replace with an even higher end transformer, would take the DAC into much higher levels. It my mind it makes it a good value for a Dac I won’t need to replace for probably another 8 years.

I'm not a fan of oversampling and upsampling. I understand it upsamples everything to 512 DSD. You may love it.

I've been burning it in over the past month and it continues to get better. While I haven't tried every $8k DAC out there, I'm not afraid to say that it definitely competes with DACs like TT2/mscaler stack and Wavedream based on my system. Obviously when you get to this level, you start honing in on what your preferences are and not necessarily which one is better technically since they all perform technically very well. 

If anyone is curious, I'd recommend grabbing a MK1 to see if you enjoy the latest firmware and use your imagination on how good MK2 would be. It's pretty much impossible to recommend anyone a $8k DAC blindly.

I’m not a fan of oversampling and upsampling. I understand it upsamples everything to 512 DSD. You may love it.

@lordmelton I agree with you in that with previous DACS and the RME UFX professional AD/DA I use in my video/audio post production workstation, that the playing back at the native sample rate sounds best.

However DSD is very simple to convert back to analog, which reaps huge sonic benefits. I don’t understand it fully, but DSD is almost like analog, in that you just insert a low pass filter on the output, and boom it’s an analog signal! If you look at the block diagram of PCM decoding you’ll see how complex it is.

All of the specs means nothing if the DSD dac didn’t deliver, which it does. My speakers are TAD, with beryllium drivers, and an added on ’stat super tweeter and subs, which really let you hear everything.  My Modded HD800 headphones/ Cardas Clear sound low res in comparison.

I've got almost 500 hours on my Mk2, and there is no question that my Mk1 is going back to PS Audio. The Mk2 is better in every way.

The new USB implementation obviates the need for the Matrix DDC for conversion to I2S that so many Mk1 users have in their systems.

I've got a Holo Audio Red streamer / Roon endpoint on order to insert between my Nucleus+ and the Mk2. It will have its work cut out for it to sound better than USB from the Nucleus+ ISO Regen setup I'm using now. At some point I'll probably pull the ISO Regen to see if it's even necessary, but I'm having so much fun with things the way they are.

@andynotadam it would be interesting to hear your thoughts eliminating the iso regen.  I’m going USB for the first time ever, but since my Mac Pro is in another room, I need about 40 feet of cable, bought an optical usb cable for the run.  

@emailists I'm having so much fun I don't want to upset the applecart any time soon. Everything I see on the forums suggests that the Mk2's USB implementation is so good that you don't really need a USB decrapifier. You should be fine...