I recently sold my DS but that unit with all of Ted’s upgrades was fun and always punched way above its class. I remember reading Ted’s post’s and he said he was about at the limit of the hardware on the DS.

and, whatever happened to their Uber DAC that was supposed to retail for around $20K? Seems I lost the thread on that one (but perhaps that's the next step for the DSD?)

Maybe the 2 box unit?

To be fair to Ted, he has been working on the Mk2/Obsidian DACs for a while now (2-3 years) but being the tinkerer he is, he found that the optimisations that he made on the next gen stuff could also be transferred to the original DirectStream and he's made at least 2 (if memory serves me right) if not 3 firmware updates for the original DirectStream that have been big jumps in performance as well.

Ted (and PS Audio) could have ended support for the DS DAC about 2 years ago and launched the new models then but I think each time he made an improvement on the DS DAC, he had to go back and figure how to make the Mk2 even better again.

I missed this. Will have to look for it. Thanks JMD

In case anyone's interested, received an email today from Scott McGowan that FPGA FW update "Mt. Massive" is now available.....

Excerpts from Scott's email:
" .....

It's extraordinary, it's revolutionary, and it's free. If you have a moment, check it out and be sure to watch the video here.

Among other improvements, we've lowered ultrasonic noise by 30dB, lowered audible noise by 10dB, and we've added a new Digital Lens FPGA buffer. We've also updated the user interface. The results are magic. The DSD MK2 just got bumped up to the next echelon of performance.

...."