Paging Bimmerman : Your ML DAC

Is the duty for hifi equipment 10%?

It is 10% sales tax if it is from China. The 15% import duty is being waived under the ASEAN-China FTA. There are a few more countries.

Normal rates for hi-fi products are 15% import duty + 10% sales tax. Effectively, it is about 26.5%.

sorry, mistake on CD Player tariff

For countries without any waiver/trade agreement:-
1) Compact Disc players : tariff code 851981290, - 10% + 10%

2) Amplifiers and Speakers: 15% import Duties + 10% sales tax
3) Speaker (not in enclosure, code 8518 29 000 (851829000), - 10% sales tax only

Max: I was wonder under what classifications will DACs be?

So to recalculate, the PS Audio PerfectWave will be
USD3,000 (MSRP) + USD391 (fedex) + 10+10% duties = US$ 4103
= RM12,309 landed

bimmerman,
i hv just read some posts in various forums on the ps audio perfect wave player and its matching dac.
from what the owners have said, the ps audio player and dac sound best when used together with the hdmi connection. there's synergy involved.
many hv said the dac's other connections do not sound as good when used with other sources.
but not many manufacturers are going the hdmi way - most are going the async usb way.
the new generation of 24/192 capable async usb dacs sound very good.

Thanks SFLam. I think my Wadia transport and ML Dac will be my last for redbook playback. When the upgrade itch hits again it will be High rez for me for sure. I'm keeping an open mind to whatever the future holds.

Who knows, the manufacturers might have finally come to their senses and agree on a single unified format by then. I heard the latest to hit the scene is 'HDMI-Audio'.

Bimmer,

Remember I was talking about the 'input buffer', basically a memory to temporarily store incoming data before sending them out again ? And this removes all jitter from the signal. It seems your ML36S has this sort of feature. ML calls it a FIFO buffer. They have a jitter rejection circuit built in but after that, the data is still read into the FIFI buffer before being read out again, reclocked to an internal clock which runs all the DAC stages. Pretty niffty design !

Yes, I am aware of that FIFO buffer in the 36s. In theory it sounds impressive but in practice... Well, I have found that you cannot just hook up a RM80 DVD player to it and expect it to perform. It just won't. I had to mate a Wadia CD transport to it in order for it to sing. And finally only after adding an Audio Alchemy DTI in between can I say it sounds like it's happy to perform.

I guess published specifications and clever design don't always result in great sound. Like in the case of the PS Audio Perfect wave transport. It reads CD as bit perfect data (that's what they say) then sends the data to the built in digital lens, once inside the Digital lens, the musical information is stored in pure form without clocks or any reference to time. The stored musical information is then retrieved by the PWT’s asynchronous fixed timing clock and output to DAC with perfect timing and extremely low jitter.

Imagine the potential the above technology holds if it is then mated to my Levinson DAC with its FIFO technology......

but alas..... I can only imagine...

... too much digital hype already. Time to get back to the music.