Thank you very much, Amir, for your excellent, much needed corrective work in the ocean corrupted by all the paid reviews, paid forums, and influencers who get these expensive devices for free (high resale value).
This is the test I had been waiting for all the time!!
I was always hoping for someone to ship you his Dave.
Many many thanks to the nice person (Jomungur ?) who shipped his expensive device for testing
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Because this thing was praised so much as the absolute flagship, absolute top.
I auditioned it a number of times, without and without the M-Scaler.
In my first auditions, I had the subjective feeling that the Dave was making the Utopia headphone sound much better than anything else. At some point I also felt that the M-Scaler was bringing in additional improvement.
Such is the psycho-social power of paid internet reviews and especially of company-sponsored sites such as Head-Fi, all the praise had conditioned me in a high expectation bias.
Luckily, the crazy price and the awful (so unpractical) design of the Dave had holden me back from a wrong purchasing decision.
At a later audition, I was disappointed by the M-Scaler, and at another one I felt the Benchmark DAC3 was cleaner with the Utopia than the Dave. I guess I had started to be less deluded by the group effect of these influences, and was less unconsciously biased.
So I am still there with my RME ADI-2 Pro as my desktop device, the volume button doesn't do what it should do when I turn it, but the RME allows me to control so many things, that I have kept it, and not even bought yet a Topping.
Thank you again, Amir!
There are so many people still unfortunately psychologically misled by Web influencers and company-sponsored sites with a strong (marketing induced) group-think. Hopefully they will be helped with such a review and have their eyes open, people can for sure waste their money, but hopefully not by being deceived.
The king of the so-called audiophile "summit-fi" (= extracting the most money from customers), so much praised, up to heaven (including by me years ago, shame on me...) has been weighted and found wanting, swept away. The king is definitely naked, so many thanks to you, Amir.
And be gone all the paid reviews and the too delusive impressions.
(I now voted "poor" because it is way too expensive, and yet does not even deliver as very cheap devices = unacceptable on the take, a mere audiophile myth for which the company gets all the hardly earned money of many deceived persons).