Mark levinson 30.5 and 31.5 vs todays cd playerrs

Hyoon, I had a digital ML front end years ago which first got replaced with reference Ensemble pieces and now own the Accustic Arts combo as my reference.

I think you would find high end digital front ends these days would make your ML combo sound somewhat dry, somewhat constricted regarding the size of the soundstage and the air around individual players, and that timbres are more natural sounding with greater overall liquidity.

If you want alot more details go to my thread entitled, Reference DACS: An overall perspective or my reviews of Accustic Arts digital gear.

Sorry, French fries lets agree to disagree, besides this is all subjective and personnal taste anyways, the ML digital pieces do sound "dry" and lack the liquidity of the best of the reference digital gear today. Even when I had the reference ML front end I added a DCS Parcell umsampler to get alot more of what I call liquidity and a sense of easyness without losing resolution in the total combination. A friend just replaced his ML-390Scdp with the Accustic Arts reference Tube Hybrid and found it hard to believe how much of a qualitative difference/improvement he got in his system.