So, my big rig of Decware arrived last week, Torii Mk IV, ZP3 w/ZMC1, and ZSTAGE. Christmas morning the girlfriend and I were spinning some Christmas vinyl while sipping our coffee, and I got up and flipped the "tube operating points" switch on the front of the ZSTAGE back and forth and asked my girlfriend, "how would you describe the difference between these two settings?" I would let her listen for a bit for each setting, then after about two auditionings on each setting, she very firmly popped out with, "well, one setting sounds like the signal is compressed, and the other setting is not compressed and has greater dynamics."  :o

If I weren't standing over the "big rig", I would have spit out my coffee, but instead, choked on it and saved my tubes from exploding! At any rate, I explained to her how she nailed it and how impressed I was! (Then she reminded me she had majored in audio production at Berkley back in the 80's - so, okay, a bit of an advantage there, but still impressive because she ended up working outside the music biz and usually doesn't speak so eloquently about my stereo, but the new DecWare gear has her attention...  :)

She's a keeper!


I need to get my Redhead interested - she really couldn't care less right now.