SOME PERTINENT OBSERVATIONS FROM REVIEWER COMMENTS THAT WE FOUND USEFUL :

HiFi+  - Alan Sircom

" Exogal may be a new player in the game, but it has some very wise heads on those young shoulders. One of those heads is Jim Kinne, and his audio hits include Wadia’s highly respected 27 Decoding Computer. The Comet is in essence the distillation of a career (or three) designing ultra-high performance audio devices.
Exogal – like Wadia before it and Chord Electronics today – eschews standard DAC technology, instead using an FGPA (field gate programmable array) for the conversion process. Six of them in fact, each acting as stereo DAC chips for the balanced, single-ended, and headphone circuits as standard.

This array of FGPAs is inherently ‘open ended’. It’s less of a DAC design set in stone, and more of a digital platform capable of significant upgrades through firmware. While nothing is ever entirely ‘future-proofed’, this inherently upgradable design means your Comet DAC is less likely than most to fall obsolete. Any prospective change is just lines of code: even if tomorrow we end up listening to multichannel music, with those six fully programmable DACs in tow, the task is not beyond the Exogal’s reach. We shouldn’t play down the amount of work required to write that putative code, but for the end user, it offers some guarantee against your Comet being Last Year’s Big Thing.
The other great advantage to a fully programmable array is this allows for custom filter options, and the Comet offers one linear, two minimum phase, and one spline filter
 

Where the Exogal really moves into ‘tomorrow’ technology is it has a pair of line-level phono inputs, which pass through a custom 24/96 A/D conversion, which is upsampled to 24/384 for internal use. This turns the Exogal into a digital hub.
 

The "milestone" Wadia 27 was one of the most natural, unforced, exciting, and detailed converters money could buy, and even today its performance would be hard to replicate. Except the Exogal Comet does just that. It doesn’t serve up a clone of the infamous Wadia 27 sound, but it has that same sense of music unconstrained by the electronics being played, especially in soundstage terms. You get a sense of why that ‘holographic soundstaging’ cliché exists when you hear something like ‘Church’ from Lyle Lovett’s Joshua Judges Ruth [MCA]; those handclaps and voices from the choir really do appear in a three-dimensional space in front of the listener, whatever the system.
 

The Exogal’s strongest suit perhaps is that it isn’t the most immediately revealing revelation. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it’s simply that a lot of audio seems to be initially impressive, where the Exogal slowly, but inexorably, convinces you of just how damn good it is. Some will never get this, because they want the ten-second ‘wow!’ demonstration. Others will realise music is about more than just being impressive and discover their music holds deeper joys. I played ‘The Pull’ from Richmond Fontaine’s excellent We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River [Décor] and felt wrist-slittingly ‘uplifted’ rather than blown away by the sound, which is precisely how you should feel when listening to this track. High-res is great through the Comet (it will happily play 32/384 and DSD128) but it isn’t mandatory, because you find yourself drawn to the music rather than the sound it makes. You can do that to almost any genre or style of music: I even ploughed through some truly wonderful – but horribly recorded – 1970s Ethopian jazz-funk by Mulatu Astatke (‘Yègelié Tezeta’ on Ethiopiques Vol 4 [Buda]) and the Exogal simply got out of the way to let the groove play on. It also did the same through the digitised line input,
 

Absolute Sound - about the enclosure
The Comet’s curvaceous anodized aluminium sides and top are fastened onto an unusual base that looks like a slab of acrylic resting on four steel ball-bearings. I asked Haagenstad about the base, and he informed me that “not just the base but also the entire chassis is part of a constrained damping structure. We tried rubber feet, but they just didn’t give us what we wanted in vibration damping. I know: Go figure that rubber didn’t adequately damp the vibration, and that’s the reason. We scanned the chassis to find out where it resonated and the steel feet eliminated that last resonant frequency. Now it’s vibrationally as dead as a brick. Give it a rap with your knuckles and see.” I did and it was. Dead, I mean.