I received my Denafrips Terminator II DAC yesterday, and (spoiler alert) it is frickin' awesome.

I'll save you all the details of my "digital journey" but for the last several years I've been using a Yamaha CD-S2100, first as a CD/SACD player and then as DAC as its laser started to go bad. It sounded good, maybe even very good but, esp. after I got my Decware amps and Omega SAMs, I started feeling like it was probably the weak link in my system. Then a thread about DACs gets going and lots of people are singing the praises of Denafrips DACs, and a lot of other people online seem to agree. I start thinking about a Terminator but didn't really want to spend 4.5K$ on DAC. Two things finally pushed me to place the order. First is I kept telling myself how I had spent way more than the cost of the DAC on CDs (I don't stream, I still like physical media), and what was the point of upgrading my amps and speakers to listen to CDs if the DAC is holding me back. The other, probably bigger thing, was how blown away Steve was by the Holo May DAC, and esp. how 16/44 files sounded like Hirez. I wanted to get me some of that.

So, the DAC arrives, it weighs 40+ pounds and I wrestle it into place, plug it in and hook the coax to my Audiolab CDT6000 transport and play a CD. And it sounds meh. Denafrips says they break it in for 100 hours before shipping but I figure it needs to warm up a little, so I leave it playing as I futz with the driver for my laptop that I use to play hirez downloads and SACD rips via USB. And the sound is still meh. Then I press the phase button and sound literally jumps out of the speakers. The takeaway is the Terminator sounds amazing and phase matters.

As I've been listening for the last day or so a couple of things really stand out. First is 16/44 CDs sound like hirez. I can't believe the detail and the dynamics and sense of space I'm getting from CDs, but at the same time the sound is smooth and liquid and in a word (and a half) life-like. I have a lot of classic mono recordings, and they sound remarkable now. The fill the space between the speakers with sound, and many of them have detail and dynamics I didn't think was possible in the 40's or 50's. The other thing (also something that Steve said that really stuck with me) is how much better No Over Sampling (NOS) sounds than OS. I tried the OS for about 4 seconds, and it made a great recording sound "air brushed" if that makes any sense. All the nuance was smoothed over in a way that I might have thought sounded good previously, but now is revealed to destroy the magic in recordings. I've tried that trick several times, and always the same results. For better or worse the sonic gap between CDs and hirez and shrunk considerably. It makes me wish I saved the money I've been spending on SACD versions of my favorite CDs and bought the Terminator sooner.

So, here's the thing. 4.5K$ is a lot to spend on DAC. But for me the Terminator is totally worth it. And esp. if you have a large CD collection it would be something to seriously consider if you're looking for another upgrade.