Jetmo

Would love to hear more reviews/feedback about the update. I've owned the Fives for about a year and just learned the news from a recent Amazon user review. They mention the update caused some issues and had to reset the firmware to clear the update. Anyone experiencing problems? I've largely resolved my EQ issues with external tone controls. Bass and treble only, but works wonders. Is the update and the EQ firing on all cylinders? For example, can small db adjustments be dialed in to multiple frequency bands? After bass adjustments, a lot discerning owners were interested in taking slight reduction in midrange frequencies (apprx 500 hz ). I'm quite fond of the Fives' tuning once you get your bass levels right but interested nonetheless.

I've been trying to figure out the DAC bypass question as well. I absolutely agree that an external DAC improves the sound greatly, versus just outputting form my iMac, for example. I thought this more or less proved that the Fives' DAC must be getting bypassed via the analogue inputs. If it isn't, I'd love to know the reason why the sound is so greatly improved since I would think the Fives' DAC would cancel out the external DAC. Is it then that the external DAC is more or less acting like a filter/eq/gain booster or something? I only stumbled across this thread trying to figure out why the Fives weren't playing back MQA. So if it's also true that the Fives' don't allow this (for reasons you cited), this reflects my experience so far as well, where my MQA enabled DAC will play into headphones but not the Fives. The Fives' DAC limitations make a clear explanation as to why, but I'm still curious why we're getting such big gains from including external DACs into the chain.