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guydebord

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  1. I use the audio playthrough mode on PureMusic, it works like a charm. Another reason I continue to prefer PM...
  2. Best to whom? to the sales person or to your ears? IMO most sales people dont know what they're talking about, they just want to sell whatever it gives them a margin. Personally, I have never liked any Meridian product.... There are plenty of options in the sub $1000 category and the only way to know which one is best for you is to audition them. If you cant audition then scan and read as many forums as you can. Look at offerings from PS Audio, Audiolab, Cambridge Audio, Apogee, Audio GD, Eastern Electric, Rega, Metrum Octave, Schiit.....
  3. Thanks, Chris. Always very good writing. But I wholeheartedly disagree that the Berkeley Alpha only provides the extra 5%, for me 5% is something you need to analyze and determine differences, to me the Alpha difference with the RefLink was so obvious that it was staggering and would say that it at least (in my system) provides 20% better sound. If we are talking about a value, the Audio GD DI-V3+PSU was (in my system) at least 5% better than the uLink, and it costs 50% less.... I know you never heard it, so its an unfair comment, I just want to draw attention to the word 'value', as it begs more comparisons to what is out there. Perhaps the uLink can really make sense if you have a BelCanto Dac and use the ST fiber connection, here I cannot comment because I never heard to it or the RefLink this way.
  4. You are definitely an adventurous audiophile, I went to ultrafi website and together with Geoff Kate's Machina Dynamica, I find that almost everything said sounded like some serious snake oil... Any company that mentions years of research without discussing anything about it, where everything is made to look top-secret technology or proprietary and where the owner likes to call himself an Esquire! I would be totally suspicious. Im glad its working out for you, but even with your observations I am not that adventurous with my money... I guess Im a partial believer in all things esoteric.
  5. I am, Im thinking of going on Saturday. It would be fun to meet, I agree.
  6. AjCrisci, this is certainly not our of topic, after all we should always be referring to "systems" rather than individual components. To answer your question precisely, I have the following two images: Alva Noto's Insen sounds precise powerful and articulated, as it should, Carsten Nicolai uses some serious precision equipment to compose: I actually wanted to demo the Lampi lv5 extensively but it is almost impossible, in any opportunity I will do it, Im very, very curious about it.
  7. Thanks! All. Sorry for the delayed reply, it was a tough week.... To your bad luck, all pieces of my vinyl system have been sold... if I knew of your proposition, I would have prefer that, Rats! PMC MB2S-A & Event Opal's, both unbelievable, with a huge difference in price but a small difference in quality, each has their own magic. The reason I am using both is because the room Im listening now is small for the PMC's, especially for non acoustic music, my space will change hopefully soon and then I will decide what to do. Well, I am very used to listening in acoustically treated rooms and I know what to expect from DSP room correction (before ARC2 I was using the Lyngorf DPA-1), one of the main complaints from people that are not used to it, is that the bass becomes weaker... I always try to explain that it doesn't and what their missing is the boominess that most listeners are used to, with well implemented room correction, bass is clear, naturally loud and precise. Perhaps this is why you have felt this way about RC, there are many other factors, but one has to get used to better sound and once you get it there is no going back. For setting it up, I took 15 delicately placed/calibrated measurements of the room, I payed total attention on the need for symmetrical measurements and I made a chart of the spots to measure before beginning the process, also be sure that the volume shows to the one to last green bar. After, I just forget it, the only thing is that sometimes PM does weird things, I only hope that version 2 takes care of the bugs.
  8. I only use IK Multimedia ARC2 System plugin and so far I have no interest in any other. My CPU load playing 24/192 is 3% at most, a very efficient and well designed plugin that does what its supposed to do better than the Lyngdorf DPA-1 it replaced and the DEQX I have tested in several occasions.
  9. The following text is a recount of months auditioning for the digital replacement of my vinyl system, something I thought impossible some years back... I began to write this several months ago, Inspired by recent changes to my system, I though I should finish it, I hope its at least entertaining. A few months ago I came to the following "painful" conclusions: 1. I was listening out of my turntable an average of twice a month, my lifestyle had changed a lot! One week a month traveling and three weeks with two wonderful kids, a 4 year old and an 8 year old, living in a compact apartment in NYC. 2. Most of my new music was in digital format. I didnt have the time anymore to hunt for vinyl and when I did I ended up spending a lot, thanks to the fetish for its retro style and its popularity with hipsters, it became hugely overpriced. 3. 21 years had passed since I began in this hobby; digital had advanced and there should be some DACs out there that could come close to vinyl sound reproduction. If I let go of my turntable and related equipment, I should be able to gather enough money to acquire a top DAC. So I embarked in a 3 month long search for THE DAC. My ceiling was $10K, which would be a less than half of the value of my now used turntable, arm, pre-amp, cartridge, cables, record cleaner and anti-vibration platform. For those of you curious about the equipment I was going to replace, it consisted of: ASR Basis Exclusive (~$12K) phono pre-amp Clearaudio Ambient CMB with Satisfy Carbon & Audience Au24 balanced rewire (~$7.5K) Lyra Helikon SL (~$2.5K) Gingko platform, Clearaudio Smart Matrix record cleaner and Siltech preamp balanced cables (~$3.5K) The system I used to audition the dacs consisted of: Kharma CRM 3.2FE Monitors Speaker cables were van den Hul Inspiration Hybrid with Silver WBT spades. Halcro MC20 Amp Kharma Grand Reference XLRs for connecting the Amp to the DAC Lyngdorf DPA-1 Preamp/Room Processor, bypassed to the DAC Logitech Transporter as source, bypassed to the Lyngdorf Digital cables I used were the Siltech Golden Ridge AES/EBU and the van den Hul Digicoupler. Various connectors and power cables from Nordost, ASR, Audio Art, Siltech, van den Hul and Oyaide. After extensive reading I came out with a pretty decent list of equipment to audition, the only requirement was that the dacs had to have balanced connections and be able to support 24/96. This ruled out Audio Note, Zanden (Philips TDA-1541A) or any other with that popular dac chip. Here is the audition list I compiled: Weiss DAC202 ($7K) Berkley Audio DAC 2 ($5K) PS Audio Wave Dac MK2 ($4K) AMR DP-777 ($5K) Acoustic Arts Tube Dac 2 SE ($11K) Meitner MA-1($7K) Ayon Skyla 2 ($8.5K) Antelope Zodiak Gold/Voltikus ($5.5K) Audio Horizons DAC 3.1Sv NOS ($5.5K) Audio Research DAC 8 ($5K) I succeeded with auditioning all of them except the Ayon. As you would expect, I immediately eliminated a few of them after the first listen, they just simply could not measure up to the sound of my vinyl rig. These were the PS Audio, the Weiss and the Audio Research. I was now left with 6 players to audition carefully, which fastly became just three: AMR, Acoustic Arts and Audio Horizons. Later, to make the job easier and more precise, I used the same very distinct 10 recordings to evaluate the performance of the dacs (always volume matched): Gordon Mumma: Music for Solo Piano Arve Henriksen: Chiaroscuro Colin Stetson: New History of Warfare vol. 2 Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Insen Pauline Oliveros: Tara’s Room Terry Riley: In C (Ars Nova Ensemble) Supersilent: 10 Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft: Out There. In There Brigitte Fontaine: Vous et Nous Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (XR 24 bit) The most important characteristic I was looking for was liquidity, the sense of natural and organic flow of the harmonics and silences between notes. I am an avid concert goer, so its easy for me to have present the sound of a live instrument, which has been an almost impossible task for digital reproduction. For many reasons discussed in countless forums and magazines, vinyl always had a dramatic edge, a good analogue system will always give a great sense of natural flow, rhythm and pace to music, whereas most good digital systems would over-clean, sterilize and “artificialize” music. Of course, there were many things that digital did better than analogue and my new dac had to be able to render the great characteristics of digital, together with the liquid and organic properties of analogue. I wanted all, but I new it would not be possible... But I had to be demanding, after all, I was probably spending $10K!!! right? AMR DP-777 After reading a bit on the AMR777, I thought this was going to be it. My first audition was in a dealers room, with his best system, it didnt impress me at all, the music was very laid back and slow, soundstage was unnaturally deep and instrument placement was confusing, although the bass was well defined. The dealer apologized saying that the unit only had ~200hrs of burn-in and that it needed more. So I contacted another dealer who claimed that the unit had 400+ hours of burn-in time and went to see him. He installed the dac into an expensive system, consisting of einstein’s top preamp, top VAT mono-blocks and $60K plasma tweeter speakers. Music didnt sound slow anymore but still I found it very laid back, instrument placement was less confusing but still unnatural and the soundstage was still weird, no matter which setting we used, I still couldnt feel the analogue within. Dont get me wrong, it sounded great overall, but I had to be super picky. What I did love of the dac was the bass reproduction and the resolution, the unit was also beautiful and well made. Was it liquid? yes, but not to my standards. Later I managed to get a unit from another dealer for home audition and kept it for 2 weeks, I learnt to love it, but there was something artificial about its soundstage, especially when playing small ensembles like in Kind of Blue. So I returned it. After carefully listening to the three dacs, the AMR fell to the third place, now that I think of it, perhaps the Zodiak and Meitner were slightly better or at the same level of, just different tastes. ACOUSTIC ARTS TUBE DAC MKII SE I fell in love with the Acoustic Arts from the start, a gorgeously made musical instrument, music was as analogue as digital can get (I thought), flowing in silk while the sun sparkled and shined through it revealing its transparency, light, floating, becoming part of the air. It was the first time I heard digital this way for this price (Audio Note DAC 5Special and Kondo M100 are exceptions) and was convinced that this was the one dac to get. I had a vinyl version of half of the recordings I was using to test, going back and forth really helped get the sense of the dac’s approximation to my analogue system and to my surprise most of the times it managed to convey that liquidity I was looking for, I was a happy man! However, there was one issue that I couldn’t get over, this dac didnt have volume control and since one of my directions was to simplify, this was a negative point. AUDIO HORIZONS TD 3.1SV & 3.1SV CONTROL At the same time I was auditioning the AA, the Audio Horizons had arrived. I had only heard about this company through record breaking positive reviews of their 2.3 tube preamp by Audiogon users and a review by 10Audio. The way the dac was described in the Audio Horizons website intrigued me a lot, and perhaps, for nostalgic reasons, I was very attracted to a truly handcrafted machine. The Audio Horizons offer was also a DAC only solution, I wanted a dac and a preamp in one box and since AH had such an amazing reputation with preamps and most of the analogue section of the dac was shared with their famous 2.3 preamp, I asked them if it could be possible to build a custom DAC/Preamp with a high quality stepped passive volume control, and they said yes, but before this happened, they urged me to listen to the DAC as is, reason for this was their 30 day audition program only applied to non custom equipment, so i did... The selection of components that I chose for the 30 day audition already placed the dac in a custom category, at least compared to the other options I auditioned. The TD3.1 DAC is based on the newest AKM 32bit chip and push pull tube (E88CC) analogue output circuitry, but it has many different denominations according to the level of components chosen, and the price varied from $2995 to close to $5000, the one I chose to evaluate was their top of the line 3.1SV with NOS Tubes, which included: All silver/teflon internal wiring CuTF V-Caps (Capacitors) Vishay premium resistors Black Gate capacitors A bank of 4 Hammond Coils at the output Chassis damping package + solid rosewood sides Harmonic Alignment package Furutech fuses Siemens CCa NOS tubes (I later added Herbies Ultrasonic Rx dampers) After the unboxing I was a bit surprised, I had gotten used to British and German made products where precision craft is SOTA and clean aesthetics rule, the Audio Horizons in comparison looked artisanal, you could sense the handcraft that visually connected with the human labor that built it, the chassis was strong and well made, but it didnt compare with the material quality of the AA or even the AMR, however there was something appealing about the AH visual construction, the wood side panels made it look like a vintage piece which contrasted the hi-tech look of the AMR and to some extent the AA. After listening to the AA I didnt have high expectations. I connected the AH, waited 30min for warming up the tubes, then played Arve Henriksen’s Chiaroscuro, I felt goosebump after goosebump, something magical began to substitute the air around me, an event that can only be described as pure musicality. To be fair, I have always had a passionate relationship with the Album, I still can remember the goosebumps I had when I first auditioned the Kharma’s, but having this feeling again became the sign, I needed to audition this DAC with respect! Record after record, the AH could not be reproached, I thought that you could only achieve this level of liquidity with the most esoteric 16bit Non-Oversampling-Dac’s, namely Kondo KSL or Audio Note DAC5, to be able to listen to 24/192 recordings in this way was a revelation, very close to my analogue kit and many times equal or better. The sense of space was there – a quality I always felt lacking with digital –, the backgrounds were not pitch black, they had spatial texture, depth, atmosphere! The bass was musically solid, strings sounded like strings, piano sounded like piano, I was feeling the air of the trumpet, voices were in my room. I was sold! Comparing it with the AA was not that difficult, each DAC had its own personality, the AA was very dynamic and clear without sacrificing musicality, the AH was musical and liquid without sacrificing dynamics and clarity, where the AH leaped ahead was in the way it rendered the sounds of silence, the textured background I just referred to, this is something that the AA could not equal, its backgrounds were blacker but in a vacuum, to empty be able to parallel vinyl or better, a live chamber concert. There was not much to do at this point but call AH and order the custom pre-amp version of their DAC, it took a while to be built, around 2 months (esoteric parts take forever to source) but when I plugged it in I felt this was the perfect DAC to replace my vinyl system, that day I logged into my Audiogon account and placed the ads, all was gone within a week! TODAY I am now a Computer Audiophile, no turning back! The addition of the Berkeley Alpha USB has catapulted my DAC into unexpected levels of reproduction, on the software side, IK Multimedia’s ARC2 System paired with D-Channel’s Pure Music provide now the base for the best sounding system I have ever put together in my many years of hi-fi exploration. The DAC pushed me to simplify, the Kharma’s are gone, the Halcro is gone and so is the Lyngdorf. Direct DAC to Actives was the ultimate conclusion of this radical overhaul. Will I be upgrading my DAC in the near future? I wont stop auditioning, but until I hear something that makes my jaw drop, this baby stays with me. I have never felt an attraction to DSD as 99.9% of the music I love was not recorded on that format, strange, I never have felt a non-urge for upgrading, I guess Im very satisfied.
  10. I subscribed back in the 80's and early 90's when they were pocket size, since then it has changed radically. I have yet to read a really bad review in Stereophile, these guys you seem to like are not trustworthy to me, I see them as instruments of the industry but not as serious reviewers.
  11. I did try A+, I own licenses for the three players, always comparing... I did hear a small improvement with "direct" integer but nothing compared to the improvement I hear in PM (hog mode) using the ARC2 System plugin. Until A+ comes up with plugin support Im sticking with PM.
  12. I did try the Weiss INT202, sometime ago and recently, my Berkeley dealer in NYC carries both. I preferred the Audio GD DI-v3 + DI-PSU, for some reason I have never been impressed by Weiss electronics, there is something clinical about them. Needless to say, the Berkeley Alpha USB is to my ears, superior to both.
  13. I preferred PureMusic over Amarra and equally to Audirvana. Besides, even if Amarra or Audirvana were a bit better, I need PM for its plugin capability, the plugin applied makes PM way superior than the other two....
  14. I tried the balanced goldpoint attenuator when I was selecting the one for my DAC. It's very good, I assume the non-balanced is as good and for 50% off is a bargain. I ended up choosing the Khozmo, it was more transparent, plus it gave me the option of using vishay z-foil's.... High Quality Audio & Industrial Attenuators and Passive Preamplifiers
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