Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital zwart

Pro-Ject’s compact amp/DAC pairs especially well with modestly priced headphones, and it can also serve as a stereo preamp.

Pro-Ject’s compact amp/DAC pairs especially well with modestly priced headphones, and it can also serve as a stereo preamp.

I mean, its not a $10,000, 32bit, I sold a kidney for it, FPGA controlled resistor ladder DAC. BUT, it is a dual ESS9038 DAC. If you want to only sell part of your liver, check out GD AUDIO. A *LOT* of the low to mid, and even some high priced DAC's use one ESS9038 for stereo sound. This little box uses two ESS9038's in 'dual cosine', whatever that means, thereby resulting in one ESS9038 per channel! Massdrop had a dual ESS9038 by LKS (fully balanced) recently for more than $1000 more than this guy. This is effectively the same kit (chip allocation wise), but not fully balanced. Is it worth spending an additional $1,000 for a fully balanced kit? Not to me! In any event, this little beauty sounds great. Also, designed by zee Germans. So its got to be great! Only complaint is that I wish it came with a linear power supply, or even a decent wal-wart.

I mean, its not a $10,000, 32bit, I sold a kidney for it, FPGA controlled resistor ladder DAC. BUT, it is a dual ESS9038 DAC. If you want to only sell part of your liver, check out GD AUDIO. A *LOT* of the low to mid, and even some high priced DAC's use one ESS9038 for stereo sound. This little box uses two ESS9038's in 'dual cosine', whatever that means, thereby resulting in one ESS9038 per channel! Massdrop had a dual ESS9038 by LKS (fully balanced) recently for more than $1000 more than this guy. This is effectively the same kit (chip allocation wise), but not fully balanced. Is it worth spending an additional $1,000 for a fully balanced kit? Not to me! In any event, this little beauty sounds great. Also, designed by zee Germans. So its got to be great! Only complaint is that I wish it came with a linear power supply, or even a decent wal-wart.

The sound Quality is Superb however the USB port fell off on me for the second time this is my third PreBox s2 DIG and all three had issues with build quality... Would spend the extra cash to find another device that offers 100% MQA decoding.