This year, I bought a Mystique V3 and while it was a significant improvement over the DAC I was upgrading from, I didn’t totally love it at first.
So while the Mystique V3 should realistically be my “upgrade of the year,” I tweaked the rest of my chain trying to get to a place where I really loved what I was hearing, and the thing that finally put my chain over the top was a $400 purchase that I wasn’t expecting much from:
My 2022 upgrade of the year I think has to be the Sonore ultraRendu, which I only bought this November, but it was a much bigger upgrade over the microRendu than I expected and it finally brought the Mystique V3 to the place that I’ve spent nearly half the year trying to go.
It’s maybe a bit of a Sonus cliché to talk about how much your source matters, but yeah, it really does! lol