I’ll just start it and address the elephant in the room. I personally don’t trust this company (Musician) with any of my money. If you do, and you bought/will buy this DAC and you’re happy with it, great! Stop watching/reading reviews and enjoy your music. For the rest of us, this DAC and the company behind it have a number of issues that I heavily consider you take a look at.
First there’s this:
There was some speculation as to whether the Pegasus is just a Denafrips Ares with slightly modified components. Sure, you can consider this common practice in China and maybe it will sound better to you. Your call whether you think that’s okay. They also seem to feel like their product is superior to the Ares. The initial distrust was there from the start.
Next was the review unit Zeos received:
Check Zeos’ review posted today for details but basically he received a Pegasus for review and it distorted after a few days. He received a new unit and he just reviewed it. You could consider this an isolated one-off incident but then…
… this bombshell dropped:
I’d watch this whole video here. There’s quite a few issues. First, they were told very specifically not to compare it with the Denafrips DACs. They never gave a reason why. Then, the Pegasus had left/right inverted polarity issues that Musician refused to acknowledge. And finally there was an episode with a amount of violent distortion from the DAC. Subjectively, Jay also mentioned the Ares II is a better sounding product even when the Pegasus was working properly. And perhaps there were quite a few more faulty units out there? In the comments of that video they state that Musician reached back out and they were possibly working something out?
Musician posted a response to the video here. This to me is the last straw. Their response to the issues with the Pegasus boils down to “We don’t experience issues so this is probably a problem with their source gear.” and a bunch of email screenshots (which to me look very sketchy).
At this point even if you somehow trust Musician as a company, I would be extremely wary of the QC issues associated with this DAC anyway. If you want an R2R DAC near $1000, I would get the Denafrips Ares II. Or maybe the Schiit Bifrost 2 with their unique R2R implementation.
Easily the best DAC I have listened to, my other mid-fi’sh DAC I owned was the Chord Mojo/Audeze Deckard.
Here’s another review that swayed my purchase along with the 11.11 sale they had on this DAC. He’s spot-on.
Old news, long since disregarded. It is no secret, and notthing shady about the fact Denafrips sourced out its engineers and manufacturing to Musician. You’re making a tempest out of a teapot; this is a very common practice in China–and the US. So, who cares.
Secondly, those YouTube kids released their vid just to get clicks. Musician tried to resolve things with a replacement, but the YouTubers more or less decided to ignore the offer and put out the negative vid, figuring they had a real scoop. They didn’t. As a start-up company, Musician had a few glitches which they quickly fixed. Subsequent units have had no complaints about QC.
Lastly, almost everyone who’s actually owned or auditioned a Pegasus loves it. Your claim that it’s not as good as an Ares II is simply untrue based on expert reviews and customer feedback. In fact, many owners feel it’s comparable the Denafrips Pontus II, or at least somewhere in between the Pontus and the Ares.
Your post serves no value to people who want accurate, current information about Musician, and its products. No controversy here, move on.
you need to back up your claims with evidence / reference’s that prove they are true.
Hifiguides Amazon Link