murray,

i think we are going to have to agree to differ - i'm not convinced that a 'format' that's been lossily compressed, decompressed, had it's dynamic range compressed by 40db and then had 1/4 of it's frequency range (compared to the limits of human hearing) lopped off is worth spending any money on and that's before we get to interference and interruption. the fact it's going to be switched off in about 4 years time just puts nails in it's coffin afaic.

cd may have many similar issues but the extent of the damage is much less and iirc even vinyl has to be dynamically compressed or the cutting heads can;t cope (although i'm not 100% on that) and then there's all that riaa stuff too.

fm just falls below what i consider to be hi-fi. whereas cd and vinyl don;t. i'd also say the same about compact cassette as well.

dunc,

there's no problem reconstructing the waveform (as long as it;s been recorded correctly and had all content over 22.1khz removed before sampling) it's the filtering and analogue output stages that can cause problems but then these things dip into the realms of subjectivity hence the proliferation of nos and oversampling devices.

we both really like the decade but i can understand if someone else didn;t like it or preferred another dac.

cheers

julian