Has anyone heard the PS Direct stream mk2?

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.

@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.

@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.