For years, we were locked into format wars. CD vs. SACD. DVD-Audio vs. Blu-ray. MP3 vs. FLAC. Physical vs. digital. I’ve lived through all of it, and yes—those formats do sound different. Anyone who's spent time listening critically can hear it. But what strikes me now is how those battles have started to feel… less important.
Because today, the format is no longer the bottleneck. Not when you’ve got the right hardware.
Our new PMG Signature 512 DAC and streamer doesn’t care whether the bits come from a disc, a drive, or a data center. Neither does the AirLens streamer. What matters is what happens next. The moment those bits hit the buffer, the rest—the file type, the transport, the delivery path—is left behind.
That’s the beauty of the Digital Lens technology at the heart of these products. It reclocks, regenerates, and isolates the signal so completely that timing errors, jitter, and noise are stripped away. You’re left with only the musical content—precisely timed and intact. Whether it’s a DSD file from a local server or a FLAC stream from Qobuz, it reaches the DAC as clean and musically coherent as anything I’ve heard.
This changes everything. We’re no longer chained to silver discs or expensive transports to get great sound. We can stream from across the world or play from a NAS in the next room. And as long as the final stage—the DAC and streamer—is built properly—in our case using the new PureStream technology—the rest becomes a matter of convenience.
We’re entering a new chapter. One where you no longer have to choose between sound quality and flexibility.
One where the music, finally, just plays.
