John
My final thoughts on AURALiC’s Vega have just gone up on 6Moons. Make no mistake – this is one fine-, fine-sounding DAC. It gives the listener far more aural satisfaction than DACs swimming in the budget end of the market (say, <$1000). For a similar cash drop, the Metrum Hex is capable of pulling up alongside. Both DACs have well thought out USB implementations and neither demand the intervention of USB-S/PDIF conversion for maximum performance. Both DACs sound terrific, each for different reasons. I tried to separate them, to pick a clear winner. I couldn’t. Click here to read my thoughts.
Clearly, the AURAliC Vega has the more impressive feature set of the two and is aesthetically more agreeable. If you need a digital pre-amp, the Vega is your guy. I think I’d (previously) underrated its ability to satisfy in this regard. Having recently fed its output into an ME 550 power amplifier I found myself wanting for very little and managed to eek a consistently impressive performance out of the Magnepan MMGs.
We talked about ‘Alan‘. Xuanxian Wang’s (pictured below) attentiveness and promptitude with email replies was super-impressive. This augurs well for anyone unsure about buying a product from a relatively new player in the digital audio field. Well played, Sir, well played.
Further Information: AURALiC
