Okay......best single box reference CD player

Mapman: I do believe that the designer IS "doing something special or unique."
I'm sure you and many others are most interested in discovering exactly how Andreas approached this design. I rather doubt that he will be sharing his design secrets with the world any time soon.

"Wow. How does the Playback Designs accomplish what apparently other players cannot? What is the difference or new innovation in a technical sense? The designer must be doing something special or unique?"

the Playback Designs MPS-5 does all the obvious things right; a transformer instead of switching power supply, excellent analog output stage, a high quality Esoteric transport, and digital inputs for use as a server DAC. beyond that Andreas has somehow eliminated jitter both from the Esoteric transport and any digital input....and he has a totally custom designed, programable DAC.

it's the combination of all these elements which results in the performance. the hard part for the competition will be to compete with Andreas's digital design since it's proprietary; also meeting the price point with all the value.

Its weird that everybody who has an Evolution Acoustics speaker has a Darzteel amp. And everybody who has both has a Playback designs cd player.

I suppose synergy is above everything.

"the Playback Designs MPS-5 has a totally custom designed, programable DAC"

A programmable DAC sounds like a useful feature. Does that mean it can in practice be programmed to sound different case by case if needed/desired?

I'm curious if anyone knows how this feature is applied in practice and by which party, the vendor, user, or both?

Any other players out there that may have user programmable or configurable DACS?

Its weird that everybody who has an Evolution Acoustics speaker has a Darzteel amp.

the Evolution Acoustics use an integral digital amp to power the 15" woofers; which allow for a 93db, 6 ohm speaker which only needs a main amp to power above 100hz. one then has the opportunity to choose a mid or low powered amp with maximum refinement and naturalness. the dart then becomes the ideal solid state choice to use. when you hear these two products together it is easy to understand why they are combined.

what other mid-powered solid state amp would one choose that is better than the dart? some are likely a bit different; but better? there would probably be a few different tubed mid-powered choices which one could choose.

And everybody who has both has a Playback designs cd player.

obviously; the source for the above products manufacturers the Playback Designs....and therefore these customers are naturally among the first to be offered the Playback Designs.

i suppose synergy is above everything.

actually; there are a good percentage of early Playback Designs owners who own neither the Evolutions nor the darts. these other owners are experiencing the same performance leap that the Evolution-dart people are.

i think that amps and speakers must be synergistic to work.

the highest quality sources should synergize with any/every natural, high resolution system. sources should be neutral and should not require specific speakers or amps to work right.