In my personal opinion the Horizon's flexibility of valve/tube choice will provide extreme opportunity to trim the sonics to your own taste, possibly like no DAC has ever done before.
The flip side of that is determining the best valves/tubes to use will be a lot more complex. It's hard enough with two triodes and a rectifier.
Will it provide better sonics than a Pacific? It will unquestionably be different. It's basically pentode based and pentodes were developed after triodes and modern is better, right?
I am not so sure. In my twenties to thirties when I probably did my most learning about hi-fi, I always wondered why the older technologies seemed to sound the best. I am still not sure what the right answer to that question is, but the obvious answer would be they have had the longest period of time to be optimised.
If that was true, though, contemporary valves/tubes would sound the best. And it is quite clear that they don't, really, when compared to the better NOS types.
I'm personally not influenced by how great Lucasz thinks it sounds. I have heard so much variation in the sound quality of various Lampi pieces I know it can't be relied on.
What can be relied on is your flexibility to alter the sound to your taste in a manner not many rivals can match. Plus it's purely a crazy design that the most technically proficient and focused designers would probably want to flush down the toilet if they could get the fucking thing to go down there.
Whatever. Don't take me too seriously. Just making some points. Those who think it's for them I hope they find great pleasure from one. It is a fairly exclusive product.
