With the three balls lying loosely in the recesses worked into the upper disk of the Darkz C2T, a quick installation very much requires a steady hand. But it’s worth it. To start the comparison, I choose the song "Death Letter" from Cassandra Wilson's album New Moon Daughter. The C2T let the music clearly sound more beautiful, as they offer a lot more of detachedness, and, once again, they structure the stage in a much more differentiated and clear way. This difference appears by no means to be small and almost sounds as if the wall behind the audio system is vanishing: If up to now it has been a matter of openness with a clear outline, the comparison makes it clear that there has previously been a spatial limitation. Even now, voice and instruments remain three-dimensional and in no way lose themselves in spheres. They seem liberated, and this creates a fascinating presence of the music. Therefore the Darkz maintain their set position in my setup.

At this point I make a clean break and start rebuilding the test set-up. As I don't want to try out the Ansuz components with the computer alone, I switch over to the path of network streaming with a streaming bridge. Right at the beginning I already stated that this is mostly considered the royal road once you have experienced it. As the owner of a PS Audio DirectStream DAC, I can keep it easy going: I simply implant the Bridge II into it and obtain a first-class hardware solution without having to think about additional connection or power cables. Throughout the test process, I mainly used to stream CD quality material from Qobuz, in order to be able to later use the PS Audio Bridge with music of a comparable quality, given the fact that the Audirvana data buffer would then not be accessible. However, "City Lights" by Lisa Batiashvili or "New Moon Daughter" by Cassandra Wilson were played in high resolution. For these, I now change my Qobuz settings to CD quality as well. Nevertheless, the PS Audio Bridge makes the music sound better, or, to be more precise, explicitly clearer and with more pronounced finesse. There's no question that this is the sonically superior way. To control the bridge I select BubbleUPnP on my Android smartphone, which I like musically better due to it offering more warmth than the Mconnect, which is often used in this constellation and which I have installed on my iPad. It’s a real burden that even the UPnP control software operated on Android or Apple devices emits its sonic effects. Before going into detail, I must state that everything that has been tried out so far with the Bridge in the streaming set-up turned out to be similarly obvious as before on the computer. Even now, a direct LAN connection between router and bridge would have been feasible, but the Ansuz switch, being technically superfluous here, was still able to mark its advantages clearly and distinctively audible.