A couple of months ago, the Swedish hifi enthusiast Ola Björling started Youtube channel Ukiro Music to share his personal audiophile journey with an online audience. He made a big splash with it, adding episodes with gear reviews, music reviews and trade show reports at an enviable pace. Rarely have we seen someone enter the world of audio reviewers so convincingly. Ola combines extensive knowledge of audio with a deep passion for music and a disarming honesty in his expressive presentation. And he has good ears…
In one of his episodes he talks about why he bought an MU2. Comparing it to other very high performance DACs, he searches carefuly for words. He says he preferred the MU2 because he felt that “switching to the MU2 rarely felt like a change at all, but somehow I more often wanted to stay there. And when I did stay, it was the one of the two that moved me the most.
(…)
To my ears and to my heart, the MU2 offers this kind of small but profound nudges towards the fantastic. Interestingly, the sonic improvements that I heard, the sort of rightness of music, was noticeable also with music that was entirely unknown to me. So stuff I’d never heard before. And that kind of means to me that there’s something about the texture of all sounds coming out of the MU2. A sort of universal quality, where it just makes things feel right in a way that I honestly wasn’t sure that digital could do.
(…)
I’m a curious person in general, and nearly obsessively so when it comes to sound, but the MU2 just melted that curiosity away. I simply didn’t want anything else. I just sat here thinking, wait a minute, I can kinda sorta afford this thing, and if I buy it, I’ll just have this sound every day forever. So that was it. Bizarrely, that made the MU2, at once, my single most expensive and also simplest audio purchase.”
Please enjoy the full video on Youtube here.
“I’m confident that for my tastes and needs and desires, I now have one of the best digital sources that money can buy.” Ola Björling, Ukiro Music
