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AV-OCD

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  1. Elp - No argument from me about the Studio 1's, they are a completely different speaker than the Studio 2's. I didn't mean to lump all Revels into the clinical camp. I had a pair of Gem 1's on loan from a friend a few months ago and they are phenomenal speakers. From the mid-bass on up, much better texture and tone than the Studio2's. Exceptionally dynamic too. As for "synergy" I agree to an extent, but I think the only thing that would have warmed up and smoothed over my former Focal 1037Bes enough to make them pleasing to my ears would have been some tubed electronics. I went through a good number of high-end SS electronics trying to tame them and nothing helped. So for me (with the exception of tubed gear) is always speakers first and fine tune with electronics, rather than trying to fix a problem with them.
  2. @ twelvebears - I could never understand the claims that the WBs are "clinical", well unless your reference point is something very heavily colored to the warm side of the spectrum. You want "harsh", try on a set of Focal Bes, you want "clinical" try Revel on for size. Even with a very modest front end that I had to use at the time I was auditioning the WB Discoveries, they were more natural sounding that either of those two speakers. The truth is, the WBs were one of the few audiophile grade speakers I've owned that didn't make complete mincemeat of lesser recordings, so they are anything but harsh or clinical to these ears. @ seta - I'm sure that there was an adjustment period going from Watt Puppies to ACTs. The ACTs may not project out at you like the Watts, but I agree that there transparency and soundstaging are much better. When auditioning the WB Discovery against the Revel Studio 2's, my wife said, "they both sound great, but the WB's make it sound like the performers are real." That was the deal closer for me. :-) But, I got the crazy idea in my head that I should scale back my sound system and go with something more modest, so I sold off the WBs. 11 months, and 4 sets of speakers later, I'm returning to WB. A set of Trinities, Centre and ARCs are in route to me and I should have them by the end of next week.
  3. Nigel - That is great news. I can't say that the WBs changed much with break in. Only a few of the dozens of speakers I've owned really have. The WB's sound great out of the box and they keep sounding that way. So you say that they are even better than you had expected. What stands out that prompts that reaction? Just curious to hear other peoples impressions.
  4. Just checking in to see how you are getting along with your new speakers. Oh, and I was told that my order will ship out of the UK on Nov. 1st. I figure I should have them a couple of weeks later. If so, that is a bit shorter wait than you had. No complaints from me. :-)
  5. 6 weeks is quite good. But maybe your right, it could be that the larger the order, the longer it takes. Be sure to report back on how you are getting along with your new toys. I'm guessing that you won't miss your KEFs too much. Though, you may have to work at placement a bit more with the WBs to get the bass to sound its best (as you do with any tower speaker).
  6. Excellent news Nigel! How long did it take for you to get them after you placed your order? I think it was right around 8-10 weeks for me (I live in Redmond, WA USA). I just placed my order for a set of Trinity's, the Centre, and some ARCs earlier this week, so the wait begins. As far as the cables, we all have to make our own decisions on stuff like this, but after numerous attempts, I've concluded that super-cables don't make enough of a difference for me.
  7. WB doesn't get a lot of press in the US, but that doesn't make them any less impressive. I hope you enjoy yours as much as I have.
  8. I think you could say I'm quite a fan of WB. I owned a full 5 channel WB system up until the end of last year. They were to me the closest thing I had heard to perfection, but in a rather impulsive decision, I sold off all of my high-end gear in an attempt to assemble a more modestly priced system that I liked as much. Several speakers later (Canton, B&W, Dynaudio, and Audio Physic), and I'm going back to WB. An expensive detour for sure, but I'm glad to be back on track again. Here's a link to a thread I started on the brand over on another forum. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1077351 Feel free to stop by and contribute.
  9. *man - Glad you found a solution. I was under the impression that you were a Mac user. Oops. :-)
  10. I've had good success with this audio file format converter. http://sbooth.org/Max/#max And bonus, it's free.
  11. @ BEEMB - First, I appreciate your determination in trying to get to the bottom of what Amarra is (or isn't) doing. Second, I wasn't bragging about the money I've spent on my system, I was just trying to ward off the inevitable "your system isn't resolving enough" response that I expected to follow. @ Steve, yes it is possible that even with all of the money I have invested in my system and room that it still isn't resolving enough to reveal what you claim to hear, but not probable. I suppose until I have the chance to come to your home and sit with you to compare media players on your system, we will just have to agree to disagree.
  12. Audioengineer wrote: "Once you compare Mac and iTunes to a good PC-based system, you start to realize how broken iTunes is. The Jitter through USB is significantly higher than with an optimized PC system. Even when the jitter is reduced significantly, there is still something wrong with the sound. Dry and non-3-dimensional." I have about $40K in my audio system, which is placed in an acoustically treated room, and I hear no meaningful difference between iTunes playing ALAC files on a Mac Mini through toslink and a $7K reference CD player being used as a transport playing the original files via coax. My prepro (DAC) has exceptional jitter rejection, but you claim that even this isn't enough. It is in my system.
  13. AA Computer Audio = www.audioasylum.com > Computer Audio forum section http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/bbs.html I did a search over there and see no threads dedicated to Wave Editor
  14. That is the general consensus around here--that iTunes is better on a Mac. Though, I believe there are some adjustments you can make to the Windows audio config to improve the performance of iTunes on Windows. I'm sure more knowledgeable people will step in with the details. All I can say is that I use a Mac Mini and iTunes and I compared on the sound quality coming out of the MM to an expensive CD transport, and I felt no need to keep the CD transport. The Mac sounded just as good, if not just a little better (more detail).
  15. OK, so THE big question was asked--how can audio playback software sound better than another? But the answer given by Jonathan of Sonic has nothing to do with the playback of prerecorded music files. When asked "THE" question, Jonathan of Sonic makes the point of saying that the Amarra software is based on the same tech as Sound Blade (used for studio mastering). He goes on to say that several of Sonic's pro audio customers have commented that Sound Blade sounds better than the other pro tools they've used, and that Sonic believes that this is because their algorithms and math are more precise when dealing with calculations and floating points. This is completely plausible and makes sense in regards to recording mastering, because you are messing with track levels, performing EQ, etc. which require calculations to be performed on the signals. Not so with prerecorded music files. All of these things have already been done, and there are no calculations to perform to get the data to the DAC. Either the software is passing along a bit-perfect signal or it is not. The only time Amarra's higher precision math capability would come into play is if you wanted to use it to upsample or EQ, in which case you are now no longer outputting a bit perfect signal.<br /> <br /> The one example Jonathan of Sonic uses to define the "better sound quality" offered by Amarra is a reduction in noise (again the result of higher precision calculations). Again, if you are mastering a recording, and tweaking all sorts of sound parameters to get the final sound you want, you don't want to introduce noise in the process, but I can say without hesitation, that there is NO noise (noise floor, hiss, grain, etc) at all in the output of my Mac Mini running plain old iTunes, so if this is one of the major benefits of Amarra, consider me unimpressed. OK, so Sonic did a comparison of the noise floor of a 24 bit file being played through iTunes vs. Amarra, and Amarra's noise floor was -128dB vs. -110 for iTunes, but when you consider that the ambient noise in most listening rooms is -55dB, the improvement Amarra offers will never be realized by the home user.<br /> <br /> In the end, Sonic gets no argument from me as to the potential benefits of using Sound Blade in the studio, but I'm still waiting for some solid and well defined reason to buy Amarra for playback of prerecorded music files.<br /> <br />
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