EAD lovers: tell me about the $10K TM Sig Classic

Essentialy based off of the 9000 MKIII dac(same Chassis) has the best dac chips ever made the 63k BBs,Teflon boards,,nothing but the best parst available were used,all hand made,and depending on what stage unit you have ,full DTS for DVDs and without a doubt one of the best sounding pieces ever made.The downside,is,it is s total pain in the ass to use,and can be extremely finicky as it has NO display and you must remember your letters and #s on the remote.Had a tendency to pop,as the sometimnes the digital flywheel would n not sync up,and the fan noise could be become distracting.

All and all compared to what is available today the sound is unbeatable other than the EAD Signature series which used the next best dac chips the 1702 BBs.The Signature is a much easier piece to use,had more software updates that eliminated problems with the classic.Pewrsonaly I would grab a hold of a more current Signature send it to Boelen have them modifiy the power supply and call it a day.Though you do not get the latest formats,upsampling,ect the sound is still unbeatable with most of what is offered today.

Thanks Sat. But wasn't there a bit of a controversy about whether the later EADs sounded as good? One aspect was the DACs, as you mentioned, but also the addition of onboard video switching. One thing that always got me about EAD was how they had like 12 models of prepros. Very hard to keep track of what was what.

The Signature versions had NO video whatsoever(so RF is no problem) unlike the Ovations and Encores(which was an outsourded piece).I have owned all of them and as a dealer I am shooting myself in the foot by not telling you to buy and 8800,but the truth is the Signature and Signature classic were and are the best period.

Sat- Tony does have a point though. I have owned the 'sister' machine to the EAD (EAD did the digital board for Sim)- the Sim Audio Attraction, and it is a well-kept secret that the 5.1 version is actually better sounding than the more current 7.1.

I would have purchased that great EAD TM Sig with the mondo upgrades you offered here recently (I see it sold), HOWEVER, what the Attraction offers that that EAD doesn't seem to is ALL balanced outs, whereas the EAD TM Sig (correct me if I am wrong please) only looked it had the balanced outs for the from two L/R channels...

Okay. So now it comes to the next question (which I actually already posted as a new thread in Digital, but it has not yet been put on the board). Let's say I'm looking at one of these Classic Sigs (no multichannel analog bypass). I now use a unidisk player (a Marantz DV8400 at the moment) that has the whole 24/192 thing going on. The Classic has "only" 20 bit converters. In this day and age, when more and more capability is being put into a source component, does it make sense to use something like a Classic (great though it may be) if you wind up having to convert an analog output from a high-res conversion into another conversion with lower bit depth?