With the caveat that the Meitner is 50% more expensive than the Prestige, we will try to provide some illumination on our impressions of the differences and similarities of these two CD/SACD players… both with built-in linestages.

The Prestige is still not quite broken in but it does have about 600 hours on it – and the Meitner CDSD tranport has an upgrade which we have not had here yet. But I think we can say something about their relative sonic attributes.

In comparison with the Meitner the Prestige has about the same soundstaging and imaging capabilities, though perhaps a little higher noise floor and a little less detail – as one might expect from a tube output stage – lending to a little bit of fog between the musicians in the sound field.

In some sense the Prestige is more enjoyable to listen to, presenting the music with an enthusiastic and optimistic attitude, with a slight exaggeration of various tonalities lending it an ‘analog warmth’. This seems to me to be much more so than the Capitole, which had an ‘analog-like’, somewhat accentuated, macro dynamic attack but not so much of the wonderful micro-dynamic attack and inner warmth of the Prestige… at least that’s what I am hearing, anyway.

The way I think of it is that the Prestige sounds like the way music sounds after a half (YMMV) glass of wine. The Meitner sounds like the music does when stone-cold sober.

The Meitner sounds real, like it really sounded like in the studio. It is a wayback machine with frequently astonishing capabilities – like having the awesome privilege of having a special ticket to attend, in person, the recording sessions of your favorite music.

And for those who have not heard the Meitner and hear something completely different than what I hear when listening to live sound, whether in a studio or elsewhere – this is not the overly etched, harsh, in-your-face dante-reality of the accuracy-must-mean-extreme-exaggeration-of-treble-attack-and-decay-so-it-sounds-like-delta-function-hell situation here. This is the ‘you are there, believe it or not, this is what the musicians cum studio engineer actually sounded like’ show.

The Prestige sounds like music, like the way music is supposed to sound. Enjoyable, a smile and toe-tapping required (in this toe-tapper sense I felt it was better than the Meitner – but we have yet to try the HRS Nimbus trick on the DCC2, so stay tuned), beautiful with all the detail and coherency and clarity that our minds want, along with all the juice that our hearts want.

So, really, it is up to each of us to choose our poison, or, actually, to choose our preferred elixir.

Next: The Audio Aero Prestige vrs the Audio Aero Capitole.

Party on, Garth!