A glorified LCD, I said

I walked past HiFi Rose in a showroom and dismissed it in one line: that's just a glorified LCD, priced like an 85-inch OLED TV. Then I auditioned the RS150 anyway, and my jaw dropped.

It was not about the screen any more. That liquid, analogue quality, the detail, the organicness, resonated with the performance of my McIntosh CD and SACD transport and DAC. I had walked in sure it was furniture with a display, and I walked out knowing I had judged the box by its glass.

And still I was not ready to spend $5,000. So I dressed up as the cheap Rose man and bought the Eversolo A8 for $2,000. To be fair to it, the A8 was a clear win over my A6 Master Edition on every front: more detail, better imaging, more refinement.

But the memory did not leave. A listening experience like that keeps knocking on your door for days, weeks, even months, and the Rose at $5,000 was still better. That is where I understood that implementation matters more than the chip, and that different power supplies and analogue stages really do sound different.

Saving $3,000 is easy. Forgetting what the $5,000 box sounded like is not.