New Cary DMS 700

I am about 220 hours in on my new 700. At 200 hours I noticed another layer of resolution, depth and clarity opening up. The one thing I have realized as a major difference between the 550 vs 700 is on lesser quality recoding's, not the digital resolution per say by the actual recoding itself. The increased resolving power of the 700 highlights and creates a high level of noticeability around the music's production flaws.   

I upgraded from the DMS-550 and I am about 140 hours on my new DMS-700 (ran the first 100 hours on a repetitive PSAudio burn-in CD). Daryl at Cary Audio has been awesome to work with. I have the DMS-700 connected to a T+A PA3000HV integrated amp with a PSAudio PW CD Transport connected to the DMS-700 via digital XLR.

I find, that the DMS-700 has an exceptionally natural sound signature with no sense of listening fatigue, especially compared to some of the equal or higher priced competitive products that I have tried in my system (Lumin and Aurender). Listening to my reference material on the DMS-700 reveals greater resolution, a larger more transparent sound stage with a wonderful analog warmth and smoothness. One area the DMS-700 excels is its ability to reproduce very heavy deep bass. The implementation of the AK4499EQ DAC chips (R2R ladder DAC) with FPGA technology has significantly improved the performance over the DMS-550.

Some great new features on the DMS-700 include the ability directly copy files over the network to the SD card and USB drives that are attached to the DMS-700. All in, I think Cary Audio has created an excellent digital source - streaming - pre-amp - DAC.

Wow you bit the bullet and did the upgrade - congratulations! It will be very interesting to hear your thoughts on how it compares to the 600.

Yes - the SD card is my best sounding source. I keep my highest resolution material (128/256 DSD and 192/24 352/24 PCM) on a couple of Lexar Professional 633x 1TB SDXC UHS-I cards (formatted to NTFS).

I am amazed that other manufactures don’t include SD Card capabilities, I wish Cary Audio would have included two slots.

Will you also use an upgraded power cable?