DAC9 Tube DAC

Audio Research's DAC 9 is from their Foundations series which means it's voicing is a little more lush and tubey sounding compared to their reference CD9SE DAC.  The DAC 9 also is a pure DAC and forgoes the CD player tray of the CD9SE. If you are looking for a high performance dac that has a tube output stage and and extraordinary flexibility, the DAC 9 should be on your must audition list.  The Audio Research tube amplification and output stage will give your system an organic, warm digital sound. In a way, putting a tubed digital front end on a system has a similar effect to adding tubed preamplifier to a solid stage amplifier to warm a system up, but perhaps even more-so.  We've had customer's install a DAC 9 in a high end system with a solid state preamplifier and solid stage amplifier, and found the system took on a fair quantity of the spacial dimensionality and harmonically rich lifelike sound that tubes are known for.  The DAC9 digital-to-analog converter decodes most current f