Fair point, but while quite true this had de facto nothing to do with the actual rationale behind these decisions.
Having been taken through the ”Varèse story” and understood a little about how and why various decisions were arrived at I can say that the ”closed” nature of Varèse (not sure I like the word but I know what you mean) is effect rather than cause. Raising the bar significantly above Vivaldi level was an enormous challenge and has taken many years and entailed inventing several completely novel solutions to overcome various limitations. Pretty much everything in Varèse is the way it is in service of one of two goals:
- Improved sound quality
- Enhanced user experience
I think some customers will be really interested to hear about some of the ”why” and James and the team are working on various pieces of collateral to explain them. It was never a goal or intention to make Varèse ”closed” per se.
The clocking architecture in Varèse has been overhauled from the ground up compared to Vivaldi. The clocks in the Varèse DACs are measurably improved compared to a Vivaldi with Master Clock. The Varèse Master Clock improves on that even further. We did it the best way we could devise based on everything we know about clocking and this is the result. There is no 10MHz input.
Yes, think that sums up what I was trying to put across nicely.