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Steve_S

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  1. I placed an order with these guys recently and agree with the previous comment. They were very helpful and I received a brand new, factory sealed item with manufacturer's warranty. It seemed to good to be true, but fortunately this was one of those times when it wasn't! I'd do business with them again in a heartbeat.
  2. Great info Steve, thank you! The laptop I pitted against the Macbook was a Sager NP3760, which is basically a Toshiba on the inside. It was an upper-middle quality laptop when new several years ago. I suppose it would be worth a try with a newer unit.
  3. Thanks Steve, you hooked me up a while back with the file off-list. You may not even have realized I was the same person at the time! I did go back and give it another go against the Mac with Play. Unfortunately I was not able to quite match the quality, the main problem being a slight edge on the highs which was only curable by methods that caused smear in the lower range. The subtleties mentioned above were also difficult to bring out. As I noted, I'm not an expert with digital audio although I'm well versed in general computing as you may guess by my sig.
  4. Sorry, no. We used wav and aiff files ripped from EAC.
  5. Two drives means twice the noise, twice the power consumption and twice the heat, which makes the fan blow harder which creates even more noise and uses even more power. I'd just replace the 120 with a larger one and turn the 120 into an external drive for backups or file transfers.
  6. Head-Fi was my first thought, but they require a minimum of 50 posts in order to be allowed to post in the classifieds. I have 15 posts on that site. I don't think I have enough to say to get to 50 in the next month.
  7. I'm a bit late in this one, but I'll throw in my experience with USB cables. I've always been one of those who laughs at expensive cables, especially for digital data. Bits are bits and so long as all the bits get there, we won't be able to hear the difference from one cable to another, right? Absolutely! Well, a couple weeks ago I was given the opportunity for a blind test between three cables, a 12" Kimber Kable, an 18" average-quality brand-name cable and an off-brand 10-footer. Shockingly, I was able to tell the difference between them all. The 10-footer, being a bit thin as well as long, was probably suffering line loss but I could still hear better quality audio coming from the Kimber Kable over the other decent cable. There are those who will tell me I'm full of it or wasn't hearing what I thought I was, and I'm not here to argue that. I'm only communicating my personal experience with something that I never thought I would tell a difference with. It's depressing, really, since now I'll never be happy until I spend $50 on a freaking USB cable. I can only attribute what I heard to the lesser cable (18") allowing noise into the stream from an external influence of unknown origin. This noise may have found its way into the stream itself, or perhaps run through the power ground in the computer, causing uncontrollable anomilies within the circuitry. I'm not an electrical engineer so I don't know the reasons for what I heard and don't care to pursue the matter. The system the tests were done on was fed by a Macbook to a very high-end high resolution audio system. I very much doubt that I would have heard the difference between the better two cables on an average home stereo.
  8. Thanks, I thought of Audiogon but hesitated because it's mostly hi-fi gear, not so much computer-related stuff. I'll check out the other site though. I just don't want to go the eBay route. It's fine for selling certain things but not this kind of stuff, imho.
  9. Understood. If anyone has links to good sites for selling gear please let me know. It's time to upgrade a couple items.
  10. Is posting used Computer Audio items for sale acceptable on this forum? Specifically HTPCs / audio servers?
  11. why not swap those out with the latest 24/192 D/A chips? I don't know the intricacies of how each chips makes the sound that it does, but the manufacturer of this DAC used these chips specifically and tuned the DAC around them. The sound is simply amazing from such an affordable unit, so I wouldn't go making huge changes that would add expense and possibly ruin the sound. If anyone wants to have their DAC modified, I know a guy in So Cal who does it. He's done a lot of work on my equipment, both tube and solid state and he's a real perfectionist.
  12. I'm a little late on this thread, ok a lot late, but I figured I'd throw my 2 cents in since I own a Valab DAC (2009 version). The reports that this little $200 DAC is a giant killer are spot on. It takes around 200 hours to break in, during which time it goes through waves of sounding amazing to downright awful. But once you get it broken in, the sound is surprisingly rich and transparent with excellent staging and separation. A friend who has a $10,000 DAC he has been developing and improving on for some time picked up a Valab in order to debunk it, and was shocked at how close it came to beating his expensive unit. The $10K DAC was better, but not $9800 better! The beauty of the Valab DAC is its simplicity. It has very short signal paths and a minimum of data / audio processing. I highly recommend this unit to anyone looking for a well-rounded DAC for USB, Toslink or Coax. The notes above about the DAC appreciating a low-jitter input are also correct, but the USB input has more precise jitter control than SPDIF and does quite well actually. I'm wary of Taiwanese goods and normally wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, but this DAC is an exception to that rule. I run mine in a $20K system and have no plans to change it for anything else at this point. Just some FYI for those interested in this DAC.
  13. Just to add to the confusion, after a long night of PC versus Mac and testing several players and output methods, we ran across one very unexpected result. iTunes 8 sounded at least as good if not better on the PC, with all settings to default. This was especially surprising because iTunes uses the Windows kernal, which isn't regarded as being very good at accurate sound reproduction. Tweaking the Midi settings on the Mac made improvements beyond the sound quality of the PC with iTunes.
  14. Vista is a bit of a resource hog compared to XP, just like XP was a resource hog compared to 2000 and 98. When people upgraded from 98 to XP, the machines would run but suffered from a lack of RAM. the minimum RAM requirement for 98 was only 32mb if I recall correctly (or was it 64?) but XP required 256mb. That was the only really necessary upgrade, and only if you didn't already have at least 256mb of RAM. With Vista it's the same thing, the system will with hardware from most XP machines, but it will run better with more powerful components, 64-bit CPU and more RAM.
  15. I haven't noticed either platform requiring new hardware, although I'm far less experienced with Mac operating systems than I am with Windows. What I have noticed (correct me if I'm wrong) is that Apple OS upgrades seem to require new software fairly often, while Windows for the most part is backwards compatible through their entire OS range. You can still run a Windows 98 application from 15 years ago on the latest Windows Vista. This is as much a strength as a weakness for both platforms.
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