mean, it's nice that the Rio Receiver won and everything, but why should it have sounded any different from the others? They should have all sounded identical because they were all sending essentially the same digital stream to the D/A converter.

But the Rio doesn't have a digital out Tony, so that can't have been what they were doing. I don't think the Slimp has a digital out either.

They appear to be taking the analog output from the devices, redigitizing it, passing it through some digital filter and then passing it back to an external DAC. All very odd.

So the Rio can sound different to the others, as it is the analog outputs (after some odd mangling) of the devices they are comparing (except with the XBox when connected with optical).