Hifi shows can be wonderful places.
I met Lee Taylor and Mallory Nicholls personally, at last year's hi-end show in Windsor.
You couldn't meet a more open and friendly pair right off the cuff.
They are not snake-oil merchants - science, technology and hands-on-experience rule their world.
A little trivia for you guys,
- one of them admitted that under certain circumstances, vinyl records can "sound" better with all else being equal, to digital - while the other disagrees totally!
When I put it to them, that may be it is the recording mix that is the culprit, one said "in that case it is not the digital medium's fault"
True! however,
the other said "but such recordings do exist".
One thing is for sure - Leema equipments sound as "Un-Digital" as can be achieved - some call it analogue but then again analogue has many flaws that their equipments do not suffer from.
Regarding DSD decoding (or lack of support as yet) , this was their unofficial explanation:
- DSD is merely a distributing format - there are hardly any recordings commercially available that are truly DSD from end to end i.e. Native DSD.
At recording stage, most edit consoles use PCM for intermediate work, then the results are converted to DSD to go to SACD's. 24/192 KHz is such a high density format (which Leema's do accept) that the need for DSD is merely cosmetic, as DSD streams can be converted to PCM easily by software in real time.
When actual all native DSD recordings become available widely, Leema will adopt it too.
For the time, as they (Lee and Mallory) say, network digital media is the future. For one it does not suffer from jitter as much as USB does, and noisy computer electrics stay decoupled from converters.
Only their top of the range Libra Dac's are now DSD capable.
The facility was added recently, I assume, because of market pressures.