The Ayre Codex is most commonly used as a headphone amplifier. When people buy them from Pearl that's the use case for perhaps 75% of our CODEX sales.
The other 25% is a bit of a surprise because these are the folks using it as a stand-alone DAC to feed their main stereo. You look at it, with its front panel headphone inputs and volume knob, and don't really think "that's a DAC", but it is. Most importantly, as a DAC it pretty much sets the bar for anything in our store for under $2000. If you are trying to build a system in stages this is a very nice piece to use as a DAC because you can later re-purpose it as a headphone rig in your office or as a travel component.
If you have a fairly nice home office system, which a goodly number of people do these days, the CODEX can really shine. You can use it as a headphone amplifier and you can connect CODEX's rear outputs to an office stereo to have it serve as a high end digital source.
The Ayre CODEX can also be run as a digital preamplifier, which means you connect it directly to an amplifier and turn the front panel volume control to adjust volume. You can configure the CODX to have either fixed or variable rear analog output. When set to fixed, the front panel volume only adjusts volume for the headphone output. When set to variable, the knob adjusts volume for headphone output and rear analog output.
A fully-balanced signal path throughout the analog circuitry provides an inherently clean and quiet backdrop for your music. The zero-feedback design maintains all of the pace and rhythm of your favorite artist, rendering your digital music as effortlessly as if it were live
$1,795