Larry Gullman co founder of MSB, California, dropped by before heading off to the Munich Show for next week. In a quirk of fate the booked MSB room had vanished from the organisers list leaving them no option but to run a static stand on the show floor. I was really hoping to hear the new select DAC at Munich and to my great good fortune he brought the show exhibit with him for me to try out with the current HIFICRITIC review system of D’Agostino Momentum paired with the Wilson Sasha Two.
We let it warm up and then listened on and off over a couple of hours. I have to say that it sounded very promising indeed, cutting right through to deliver exceptional clarity and detail with excellent far stage depth and reverberant decays. The price is massive but the performance demonstrated was certainly not a marginal, incremental improvement. Rather it spoke to the worth of the massive technology investment and the resulting high price. This MSB select DAC retails at an eye watering UK Sterling figure of 63,000 while the matching transport, now SACD DSD USB and network streamer compatible, is £9,500.
Larry explained that when you buy a select you buy into a ten year renewal program where for the first year all upgrades and improvements are free of charge and then for the subsequent 9 years are sold at trade price. For next year there will be a still more costly two box select DAC and current purchasers may trade in for it at no charge.
The current select could be regarded as a fully loaded MSB Diamond DAC plus one major and undisclosed improvement. Larry related that years of development had gone into two aspects or design vectors as he termed them, namely processor accuracy, and jitter. However recent work on their master prototype, dubbed Edison, revealed that there was a third vector, up till now not properly explored, and that when developed and applied to the Diamond DAC IV resulted in such a performance leap that it resulted in the select.
(http://www.msbtech.com/products/dac4select.php?Page=../index)
Martin Colloms
Larry explained that when you buy a select you buy into a ten year renewal program where for the first year all upgrades and improvements are free of charge and then for the subsequent 9 years are sold at trade price. For next year there will be a still more costly two box select DAC and current purchasers may trade in for it at no charge.
The current select could be regarded as a fully loaded MSB Diamond DAC plus one major and undisclosed improvement. Larry related that years of development had gone into two aspects or design vectors as he termed them, namely processor accuracy, and jitter. However recent work on their master prototype, dubbed Edison, revealed that there was a third vector, up till now not properly explored, and that when developed and applied to the Diamond DAC IV resulted in such a performance leap that it resulted in the select.
(http://www.msbtech.com/products/dac4select.php?Page=../index)
Martin Colloms
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