I have a brand new Meridian 800 v4 since march 2005. Before that one I had a Meridian 800 v3. But the v4 is totally new in many ways. When you update teh v3 to v4 you don't have the same machine. The new verseion is a few steps better than the version 3. That means that Meridian made big improvements with the version 4. But I am not sure if they still use the same dac because the inprovements are quit big.