Paul Elliott provided pictures and the narrative for this report.

Gary Gill graciously provided his home for an afternoon of good eats, good drinks, good talks, and good listening.

Dennis Clark, owner of the Leesburg Listening Room, was the special guest for this meeting. This is a new home audio dealer located about 10 miles west of Dulles just off Rt. 15. He carries PS Audio, Legacy Speakers, VPI, and many more notable products. The “Store” is located in a beautiful home in Creighton Farms private community. Dennis was exuberant in describing his philosophy of sound presentation.

Chris Barker talked about a very new affordable DAC called the Khadas Tone Board. He also mentioned he had completed a turntable kit build using the SRM Tech Azure Turntable Kit using Rega parts. It was also mentioned that Emotiva was now shipping mono block amplifiers featuring IcePower modules. Finally, there was a brief mention of the brand new Magnepan LRS ribbon speakers. Tom Perazella told us about interesting new developments using HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) technology to make headphones present a more natural sound stage.

We then clambered upstairs to Gary’s dedicated listing room for a listen to the iFi Pro DAC ($2500). This DAC is interesting because it is designed with a high-quality DSD up conversion/direct DSD engine and custom Alps volume section with a selectable tube or solid state buffer analog stage. The UK designed, China manufactured, DAC decodes to 768khz in PCM and up samples to 1024khz in DSD using the Crysopeia FPGA Digital DSD Engine. The PCM/DSD core DAC chip is from Burr Brown. The iFi Pro has tons of features including an onboard micro-SD card player that can be accessed via a Wi-Fi phone app (DLNA). Five user selectable digital filters are also available. Russ from Vinyl Revivers loaned a beautiful pair of Dynaudio Special Forty speakers. Gary’s room was tough for these small bookshelf speakers but if you got up close in a near field position you could hear what these speakers can do. They are very nice and would do very well in a small den or listening room that is better damped than Gary’s echo chamber.

Regular raffle winners included Walter and Gary Gill.

See you next month at Russ’s