Has anyone heard the SimAudio 650D?


About 6 months ago Michael Fremer reviewed the 650D in Stereophile and apparently preferred it to his Playback Designs player. Yet the 650D is placed in the B category in Stereophile's most recent rankings, while the Playback Designs is in the A listings. Very strange....has anyone heard the 650D and compared it to some of the elite players?
lula
FYI, in doing some experimenting I've found that there may be a bit of an issue when feeding the 650D with a Sooloos.

I've got a Sooloos MC200 and have been struggling since I bought it to try and recreate the (fantastic) sound I get out of the 650D's CD player from the Sooloos. No success. It sounds very good but it has always lacked some of the "body" I hear when playing CDs through the 650D. Finally went into a dealer to compare the 650D to Sooloos' Media Source 600 dac and we both realized that the Sooloos MC200/Simaudio 650D combo has a mid/upper bass frequency dip that robs the music of some warmth.

I tried feeding the 650D's S/PDIF coax input from an Arcam CD player to see if there may be a problem with my 650D's input. The sound was perfect - pretty much identical to the 650D's internal transport.

I know the Stereophile review says the 650D sounds pretty much identical across all of it's inputs, including the CD. This may be true for some sources, but NOT for the Sooloos. I'm kind of surprised that this issue wasn't reported on in the Stereophile review as I believe Sooloos was listed as a source used for the review.

If you have a Sooloos and are looking to purchase the 650D (or vice versa), I suggest you try them out together to see if the sound is what you're hoping for. Don't get me wrong, it's still very good sound but it is not as good as some other digital sources or the 650D's CD player.

CAVEAT - my 650D does not have the updated high resolution asynchronous USB board. Simaudio mentioned the new board leads to some minor improvements across the non-USB inputs, so maybe Sooloos will work better with the newer board? (the Stereophile review was a unit with the original board that is the same as in my unit, though...)
I compared the S/PDIF output of a Sooloos Ensemble with the MC200 into my Simaudio 650D dac yesterday. I got the best results with the Ensemble, which was basically on par with, if not a little better than, CD play through the 650D. Wondering why that might be - you would think that since Meridian took over the company and started to integrate their digital technology the sound would improve. Maybe the Meridian gear is designed to work best with other Meridian gear to the detriment of the sound through non-Meridian gear?
I bought a 750D and it arrives on Tuesday. Looking to order some CDs to demo on day #1. Any recommendations on some albums I can Amazon Prime for Tuesday?
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