I recently replaced an old DAC (PS Audio DirectStream) with a Matrix Audio Element X2 Pure. I have been absolutely thrilled by its performance.
I’ve spent literally years debugging flakiness in my Roon setup. It always sounded great, but I had recurring random problems with what always seemed like connectivity issues. For example, Radio Paradise — my default when I’m too lazy to pick music — would play for somewhere between 5 seconds and 5 hours before just stopping. Even Qobuz streaming would just stop for no apparent reason (the dreaded “media loading slowly” message on every song in the playlist). I just learned to live with it between bouts of frenzied but futile troubleshooting.
But since I added the Element X2, the whole thing has been rock solid. And it sounds absolutely great to my (admittedly old) ears. I won’t pretend to come up with adjectives to describe the difference in sound, mostly cuz I’m not even sure I hear any real difference.
But more importantly for me: the way the X2 interacts with my system has been pure joy. Auto-power-on works. Auto-switching works. DSD works. Roon integration works. Things just work.
This is quite a contrast to my experience with the latest DirectStream DAC (MKII), which I auditioned (and returned) before getting the X2. With the MKII, which also sounded great, I found myself struggling with little UI oddities or random instability (white noise when switching sources, for example, that needed a power-cycle to fix).