Is berkeley dac as good as absolute sound review?

Hi Tbg, I agree. One has to read reviews carefully. It is very rare when one reads a negative review. Where are all the negative comments going? Suppressed. Reviewers often put a patina on the products when they write about them. My experience is that the products often sound very different when hooked up to a real system -- not an imaginary one. Comments are often unjustified by actual real-world experience.

When the reviewer says at the end of the review "I liked it so much, I bought it" notice the reviewer never says how much he bought it for.

What difference does that make? He still chose to pay something and keep it in his system. Hard to deal with fine shadings of "levels on implied endorsement". Buying it says something positive - no more, no less. How much one is willing to spend says more about the ability to spend then anything inherently about the quality of the sound when most differences at this level are way beyond the point of diminishing returns financially.

I have it and love it and the review is very accurate. It really does it right. I have an Esoteric X03SE and using it as a transport into the berkeley for HDCD is a revelation. I don't think the review mentioned how well an HDCD encoder it is.

And, the review is spot on when it says you really have to feed the berkeley hi res signals to hear what it does. True 24 bit sounds spectacular. Check one out. Used up for $3,500 or so. Can't lose.

Whether the reviewer paid one-tenth, one-fifth, one-half or full list price for the gear makes a big difference to the reviewer’s pocketbook. If you don’t believe me, ask him. And you are right, hard to separate the pocketbook from the endorsement.