gmartan

I had this DAC in the house for three days. I found it really fatiguing after only 20 minutes of listening. My gear: Roon > MacBook Pro > BDA-3 > McIntosh C2300 with Pvane tubes > Classe CA2200 > ML Summits. I also tried it with a Marantz AVP and Opera speakers. Same. My new Auralic Vega is fatigue free and amazing. I would have preferred the Bryston made in Canada.

i just downloaded Amarra for Tidal after I discovered that it had a remote app. I was actually going to buy the Auralic streamer to get that function since Audirvana is late to the party and the Tidal app does not support a remote app or the Apple Remote that works with iTunes. Using Amarra, listening fatigue was almost immediate. I played the same slections from Tidal using their app on my MacBook Pro and it sounded just fine. Not what I expected.

It can't find anything in it's data base. Try looking for the War album if you don't believe me. Impossible. What does work is Google if you preface HDTracks before the album or artist that you are searching for.

This was exactly my point when I suggested to them that Hi-Rez does not necessarily equate to "Audiophile" quality and they should stop calling it that if they have simply upsampled an original studio master. They suggested if I was not happy with a recording that a refund would be made. I gave them two titles that I thought were sunstandard. All subsequent emails about when and how the refund would be issued have been ignored. I will now limit any purchases to those releases that detail what makes it audiophile quality. The sad thing is that they should be making available more current titles for download. Just don't call it audiophile quality unless it is. Today there is no good source of music for current releases between iTunes and buying the CD or vinyl. They could so fill that void. I would love to buy music and leave the cost of the disk behind.

I can certainly confirm that the HD Tracks albums that I have burned to disk are better sounding than the original CD. That is not universally true, however. Where the original master is poor and HD tracks has simply re-released it as a Hi-Rez file it is actually worse because the bad mix is further highlighted by playing the higher resolution file on a revealing system. I have the Rod Stewart disk and see no value in it at all for these reasons.

At age 61 I know that I can't hear much above 10K and yet I have no trouble hearing the difference, both positive and negative, of any source and any piece of gear, including those cables that actually do alter the sound. To illustrate, recently I converted some DVD-Audio disks stereo files to FLAC using default settings. One of the disks actually had 192/24 resolution which converted to a 192/24 FLAC file. I subsequently reconverted the disk to 96/24 since that is the highest resolution which the Sabre DAC from my McIntosh MCD500 will process. I was curious so I played the 192/24 file directly from my Powerbook using Decibel. I understand that Decibel recognized the DACs 96/24 limitation and adjusted the output for it. The higher resolution 192/24 file still sounded more natural, more analogue, more musical than the 96/24 file. Not by a lot but I could clearly hear and enjoy the difference. I'm sorry if you can't. You're really missing out. Insofar as HD Tracks is concerned, some of their releases may be Hi-Rez files but are certainly not audiophile quality. Those are predominately re-issues of rock and pop recordings that were poorly mastered initially and have not been redone. Most of the stuff available is really excellent quality and certainly superior to the CD releases. Their ABCO Rolling Stones releases actually sound a bit better than the SACD from ABCO which I consider to be really poor re-mixes and not at all pleasant on a resolving sound system. Odd but true. Try downloading an album that was mastered well initally or was properly re-mastered. You should be amazed.